Sally Mann's immediate family. The Enchanted South by Sally Mann. Photos by Sally Mann

Jean Fracois Millet went down in the history of world painting as a master of realism, although in its penetration the artist’s works are comparable to the works of novelists. In all his canvases one can notice the presence of a special glow, emanating not from human figures or objects, but from the painting itself. Modern criticism called this play of lighting in Millet's paintings the light of life.

Childhood and education

Born on October 4, 1814 in the family of a wealthy peasant in the village of Grushi, which is located in France. Until the age of 18 he worked in agriculture.

The artist grew up in a family that included two church ministers, a father and an uncle. For this reason, his first education was deeply spiritual, although great attention was also paid to literature and, later, painting.

His parents supported Millet's talent and in 1837 he joined the workshop of Paul Delaroche, where he stayed for two years. However, the relationship with his mentor did not work out, and soon he returned from Paris to Cherbourg.

The beginning of creative activity

A year later, Millet married Pauline Virginia Ono and returned to the capital with her.

Although he regularly exhibited his work at the Salon from 1840, real fame came to him only in 1848, when, having changed his subject (in particular, leaving portraiture), the artist focused on an idea that became the leitmotif of his work.

In 1849, Francois left Paris for the village of Barbizon. In the morning he works in the field, and in the evening he paints.

Millet dedicated his main works to scenes of peasant labor and life. In them he reflected his understanding of the life of this class, the severity of their situation and forced poverty.

In his own words, coming from a peasant family, he has always been and remains so.

Fundamental ideas of creativity

In 1857, Millet completed work on his own famous painting"The harvesters of ears of grain." The approval with which critics greeted his work was unexpected even for the artist himself.

Millet managed to hit the tone of the general mood created by the political events of that time.

He continued working in the same genre and two years later the no less famous “Angelus” appeared. It echoed the artist's message in The Corn Gatherers, but also contained the answer that Millet himself had proposed.

The life he depicted was filled with humility and faith, capable of overcoming the difficult everyday life of the peasants.

Millais also painted for government commissions, starting with his first serious works in everyday genre 1848, as well as Peasant Woman Herding a Cow (1859), it is noteworthy that it was this that led him to change direction and brought him recognition.

Millet did not paint from life; his works were created solely from memory. From 1849 until the end of his life, Millet lived in Barbizon, the name of which gave the name to the school of which he became one of the founders.

Last years

In the mid-1860s, he turned to landscape painting and sought in his works to express the unity of man with nature.

IN last years His work produced such paintings as “Winter Landscape with Crows” (1866) and “Spring” (1868-1873).

These works by Millet indicated the state of search in which he found himself. For the artist, these were attempts to find and reflect in pictures of nature harmony and justice, which he did not find in people's lives.

Millet died in 1875 in Barbizon, in the vicinity of which he was buried.

Coming from the people, Jean-François Millet is rightfully considered the largest representative of the truly folk genre in the art of France in the 19th century.

The artist was born on the English Channel coast near Greville, in the Norman village of Gruchy, into a wealthy peasant family. Involved in rural labor since childhood, Jean-François was able to study painting only from the age of eighteen in the nearby city of Cherbourg from Mouchel, a student of David, and then from Langlois de Chevreuil, a student of Gros.

In 1837, thanks to a modest scholarship awarded by the municipality of Cherbourg, Millet began studying at the Paris School of Fine Arts with the then popular historical painter Delaroche. But academic Delaroche and Paris with its noise and bustle equally constrain Millet, who is accustomed to the rural space. The Louvre alone seemed to him, by his own admission, a “saving island” in the middle of a city that seemed “black, dirty, smoky” to a recent peasant. “They saved” his favorite works by Mantegna, Michelangelo and Poussin, in front of whom he felt “like in his own family,” while among contemporary artists only Delacroix was attracted.

In the early 40s, Millet was helped to find his own identity by a few close people, executed in a modest, restrained palette, which laid the foundation for his in-depth understanding of peasant looks and characters.

In the second half of the 40s, Millet was inspired by communication with Daumier and the Barbizons, especially with Theodore Rousseau. But the main milestone for the artist’s work was the revolution of 1848 - the same year when his painting “The Winnower” was exhibited at the Salon, perceived as a creative declaration.

In the summer of 1849, Millet left Paris forever for Barbizon and here, surrounded by a large family, began to cultivate the land in the literal and figurative sense: in the morning he worked in the fields, and in the afternoon he painted pictures of the life of farmers in the workshop, where scattered peasant things coexisted with casts of masterpieces Parthenon. “The hero from the ploughman” (Rolland), he was a recognized scholar in everything related to epic bucolic poetry starting with Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, a lover of Hugo and Shakespeare, as well as the philosophy of Montaigne and Pascal. But Millet looks for his “Homeric” heroes in everyday life, discerning “true humanity” in the most unnoticed of workers. “At the risk of being branded a socialist,” he takes on the highly social theme of labor, which is unpopular and little explored by painters. Indifferent to details, the painter usually completes his subjects from memory, making a strict selection and bringing together all the heterogeneity of living observations. Through expressive, almost sculptural chiaroscuro, sculpting the figures of people in large undifferentiated masses, and the restrained power of muted color, he strives to achieve a generalizing typification of the characters in the confidence that it is the collective “type that is the deepest truth in art.”

Millet's typification is wide-ranging - from the typical sincerity of the professional gesture of plowmen, sawmills, and woodcutters to the expression of the highest poetry of labor. This is not just work, but lot, fate, moreover, in its dramatic aspect - as an eternal overcoming and struggle - with circumstances, with, with the earth. Millet discovers the special greatness of overcoming in the measured rhythms of the peasant and derives from here the very special spirituality of a man of manual labor.

The master expressed it most fully in the painting “The Sower,” which amazed visitors to the 1851 Salon. In the figure dominating the vast expanse of fields, the author brings the generalization of the eternal martial arts and the connection of man with the earth to a lofty symbol. From now on, every painting by Millet is accepted as a public event.

Thus, “The Ear Gatherers” caused an even greater critical storm at the Salon of 1857. In their majestically slow pace, the bourgeois, not without reason, suspected a hidden threat to the usual “foundations,” although Millet’s work is also familiar with pure tenderness, especially in female images. In “The Auvergne Shepherdess”, “The Spinner”, “Churning Butter” he exalts the most humble household work, and in “Feeding the Chicks” and “First Steps” he glorifies the joys of motherhood, without ever stooping to sentimentality. In Grafting a Tree (1855), Millet combines the theme of a child with escape into a single hope for the future. Millet deliberately contrasted the naturalness of his peasants and the nature around them, the purity of their life, with the moral degradation of the upper classes of the Second Empire.

In a pair of tired peasants from “Angelus” (1859), Millet reveals to the townspeople the subtlety of the soul, the ineradicable need for beauty, hidden under the bark of habitual coarseness. But the formidable power of the gloomy “Man with a Hoe” is something completely different, which frightened the critics of the 1863 Salon for good reason. In a figure no less monolithic than the “Sower”, behind the boundless fatigue one can feel growing anger. “The Man with a Hoe” and “The Resting Winegrower” are the most tragic of Millet’s heroes - images of the crushed, concentrating in themselves the motives of spontaneous social protest on the verge of explosion.

Since the mid-60s, Millet often paints landscapes in which he strives to express the eternal unity of man with nature, invariably lovingly noting everywhere the touch, the trace of man - be it a harrow left on a furrow or freshly swept haystacks. Behind the external awkwardness of the silhouette of the squat “Church in Grushi”, as if rooted in the ground, a patient meekness akin to the heroes of “Angelus” shines through, and in landscapes like “Gust of Wind”, the same indomitability of the elements that secretly accumulated in his rebels - winegrowers, seems to break through and diggers.

In the 70s, Millet stopped exhibiting at the Salon, however, his fame grew. The master’s hermitage is increasingly disturbed by visitors - collectors and simply fans; even students from different countries Europe. It was not in vain that, when he passed away in 1875, the artist prophetically announced: “My work is not yet done. It’s barely starting.”

He brought the peasant theme out of the narrowness of local ethnography, got rid of falsehood and gloss, replacing the sensitive with heroic, and narrative with the strict poetry of his generalizations. His diligent successors of realism and authenticity of heroes were such artists as Bastien-Lepage and Lhermitte, and the poetry of labor was developed in his own way by the Belgian Constantin Meunier.

Millet's landscapes had a direct influence on Pissarro's uninhibited simplicity and lyricism, but he received his most innovative response in Holland from Vincent van Gogh, who brought the rebellious spirit to its utmost sharpness in the inexhaustible theme of the combat of man with the earth.

She was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. Sally is the third of three children and the only girl in the family of physician Robert S. Munger. Her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran a bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann graduated from Putney High School in 1969 and then attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She received her bachelor's degree with honors in humanities from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and an M.A. in Creative Writing in 1975. His photographic debut took place in Putney with an image of a nude classmate.

Carier start

After graduating from high school, Mann worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee University. In the mid-1970s, she photographed the construction of the new law school building, which led to her first solo exhibition, which took place in late 1977 at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. These surreal images became part of the first book, Second Sight, published in 1984.

"At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women"

Sally Mann's second collection of photographs, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, published in 1988, is dedicated to teenage girls.

"Immediate Family"

Perhaps the most famous was Mann's third collection, Immediate Family, published in 1992. The NY Times wrote: “Perhaps no photographer in history has had such success in the art world.”

The book consists of 65 black and white photographs of the photographer's three children under the age of 10. Many shots were taken during summer holiday families in a house by the river, where children played and swam naked. For these shots in America and abroad, Sally Mann was accused of distributing child pornography. Some religious figures also came out with heated criticism.

But there were also positive reviews. The New Republic magazine wrote that it is "one of the greatest photo books of our time."

Mann always put her children's interests first. Before publishing the photo album "Immediate Family," she consulted with a federal prosecutor in Virginia, who told her that some of the images shown could get her arrested.

She decided to delay publication for 10 years so that the children would grow up and understand the consequences of making these photographs public. But the children apparently did not like this decision. So Mann and her husband arranged for Emmett and Jessie (Sally Mann's eldest children) to see a psychologist to make sure they understood what the publication might lead to. Each child was allowed to select frames that would be included in the book.

Child psychiatrist Aaron Esman wrote that the photographs do not appear erotically stimulating to anyone other than "hardened pedophiles or dogmatists, or religious fundamentalists."

Sally Mann's fourth book, Still Time, published in 1994, is based on the catalog of a traveling exhibition of photographs taken over a 20-year period. The set of 60 photographs includes portraits of her children, early landscapes and abstract images.

Further career

In the mid-1990s, Mann began photographing landscapes using wet collodion techniques using glass plates. These landscape images were shown in two exhibitions in New York at the Edwynn Houk Gallery.

Mann's fifth photo album, What Remains, consists of five parts, published in 2003. It included photographs of the decomposing remains of a greyhound by photographer Eva; photographs of bodies from the morgue; detailing the location where the armed fugitive was killed; footage taken in the area where the bloodiest one-day battle took place in American history– Battle of Antietam during the Civil War; close-up images of children's faces. Thus, this exploration of mortality, decay and destruction ends with hope and love.

Mann's seventh book, Proud Flesh, was published in 2009. This is a six-year study of her husband named Larry's muscular dystrophy. The project was exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in October 2009.

Mann's eighth publication is the 200-page book Flesh and Spirit, published in 2010. It included self-portraits, landscapes, images of her husband, faces of children and images of corpses. The general theme of the collection is the body with all its vagaries, illnesses and mortality.

One of the current projects is called the Marital Trust. It covers 30 years of photographs, including the most intimate details family life Sally and Larry. It has not yet been announced that it will be published.

Personal life

Sally Mann met her husband Larry in 1969. They have three children together: Emmett (born 1979, briefly joined the Peace Corps), Jessie (born 1981, artist, photographer, model), and Virginia (born 1985, lawyer). Sally Mann lives with her husband on a farm in Virginia. He works as a lawyer, although he suffers from muscular dystrophy.

Confession

Sally Mann's work is included in the permanent collections of many museums, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum fine arts in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum in New York and many others. etc.

Time magazine named Mann "America's Best Photographer" in 2001. Her work has appeared twice on the cover of this publication.
Mann became the subject of two documentaries directed by Steve Cantor. Blood Ties debuted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject. documentary. The second film, Remains, directed by the same director, was first shown in 2006. This film was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.

Photos by Sally Mann:

Sally Mann's works tell the stories of the American South - mystical, sometimes frightening. In them, the USA appears as a country that seems to exist outside of time. Let's remember how Mann creates his black and white masterpieces.

“The best photographer in school helped me develop my first film and we are delighted with the results. Lots of photos with board patterns, cracked paint textures on the walls... The sharpness and depth are really good. I feel happy and proud... It's incredible. Although, perhaps the result is a complete coincidence.”

This teenage text belongs to one of the most famous photographers in the world - Sally Mann. The beginning of his career was quite prosaic: a prestigious college on the East Coast ( private school Putney in Vermont), sports, libraries, workshops, celebrity lectures - American youth in all its glory, a girl from a wealthy family begins her journey to independent life. However, the path to a great career - hundreds of exhibitions around the world, prestigious galleries, documentaries and monographs - was not so easy.

Sally Mann was born in completely different places - in the south of America, in the small and sleepy city of Lexington, Virginia. Father is a doctor, mother was in charge of a university bookstore. Mann grew up completely embedded in the landscape: “I was almost a wild child, raised not by wolves, but by the twelve Boxer dogs my father kept on a honeysuckle-surrounded, dark and mystical 30-acre plot of land.”

Moving to Vermont and starting college was not easy for young Mann: sometimes it is easier to move across the ocean than for a southerner to settle in the North. “I was the minority subjected to the most sophisticated jokes. In Putney you didn’t dye your hair or wear makeup or listen to music like the Righteous Brothers... I found myself in a different country,” recalls Sally Mann in her autobiography, “Hold Still.” In college, like a saving straw, she would grab onto a photograph.

Moving to Vermont and starting college was not easy for young Mann: sometimes it is easier to move across the ocean than for a southerner to settle in the North.

Although I live in America, sometimes I miss it - under New York's leaden skies I think of the South: a mystical place that gave birth to great literature, a denial of modernity, conservative and achingly beautiful. At such moments, I pull an album of Sally Mann photographs from the shelf. As she often writes, “living in the South often means leaving a temporary space. Southerners live uneasily between myth and reality, watching an amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, mercy and apostasy play out against the lavish beauty of the landscape.” Having fallen out of modernity, the South is preoccupied with its past. Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama - in these states, nostalgia and horror of historical memory shape the present and the future.

To exist outside of time, Sally uses the half-forgotten technique of collodion printing: using a large wooden camera, an image is transferred to a damp, chemical-coated glass plate. The entire process of shooting and developing takes 15 minutes, but the result never disappoints: the photographs turn out meditative, deep, thoughtful.

Collodion printing is a technique of the 19th century, the technique of photographers who photographed the Civil War between the South and the North - the brilliant and courageous Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Alexander Gardner. The skillful use of collodion allows time and space to “travel” through Mann’s works, to drag on, to last, not to happen. When is that? Where is it? What's happening? What will happen? Time is a decoration here; it seems that the photographer is simply trying to tell us that life is quite hard.

Simple, everyday events in her works acquire universal, mystical meaning. In the book “Deep South” - a wonderful homage to his native land - the transition from family portraits to landscapes becomes a transition from private, individual memories to more public and emotional ones - about those whose past is revealed through the traces left in their habitat. "I visit places where battles took place Civil War, on a different land, a century later, in search of an answer to the question: does the earth remember?”

Body

At the end of the last century, the attitude of artists towards the human body changed radically. Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Francesca Woodman, Kiki Smith - artists of the new wave refused to consider the body only as an object of lust and admiration. The body in their work is a battlefield for self-identification. From now on modern practices in art - not a combination of artist and nude model, sexual object and symbol; on the contrary, in photography and performance, the owner of the body is the artist, and the body itself is a weapon in the fight against gender, social, political, and economic injustice. And Sally Mann has a lot to do with this change.

“I gained recognition and fame, but also the unpleasant label of “controversial,” in the early 1990s, after the publication of my third book, Immediate Family. It contained photographs of my children, Emmett, Jesse, and Virginia, living their lives, sometimes without clothes, on our farm, tucked away in the hills of Virginia. I believed in keeping my lens open to fully embrace their childhood. I photographed success, harmony, isolation, as well as difficulties that are usually common at that age: bruises, vomiting, bloody noses, wet beds.”

The photographs of the “What Remains” series, taken in the early 2000s, show human bodies that have forever left time and space, abandoned to the mercy of weather and natural disasters. The setting is a small plot of land owned by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. This is a scientific experiment - the study of cyclicality, how we, having left this world, become part of it. "Who knows future destiny of their bones or how often will they be reburied? Who is the oracle for his own ashes? Who knows if the bones will simply be scattered after death? I always remember this phrase of the English philosopher, writer, physician Thomas Browne (1605-1682) from the treatise “Burial in Urns” when looking at these photographs of Sally Mann. Brown and Mann are different universes, but here they intersect: an American photographer conducts a dialogue with an essayist of the Baroque era. I have never experienced the horror of a work of art quite like the horror of watching What Remains.

Soul

The city of Lexington was lucky: two of America's most important artists were born and lived there - Cy Twombly and Sally Mann. They were friends. Mann writes about a friend like this: “I remember many evenings when I was waiting for the children from school and met a tall, slightly stooped figure, in high socks, tightly wrapped in a raincoat, wandering from home to the workshop along Barclay Lane ... We became friends and compatriots , comrades and assistants."

The result of this long-term friendship is the Sally Mann exhibition “Remembered Light”, dedicated to the deceased Twombly. It will take place at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and will talk about the existential emptiness that remains when a strong, working, creative person leaves this world. Each photograph in this portfolio poses questions to which there are no answers.

Life sometimes consists of subtractions: the list of loved ones shrinks, folds up like shagreen leather. While preparing the exhibition, Sally learns devastating news: her thirty-six-year-old son Emmett Mann, who suffers from schizophrenia, commits suicide. Looking at numerous portraits of Emmett as a child and already knowing his fate, I understand that life will not be kind to this boy.

I believe that Sally Mann's camera captured a human soul when I look at the family portrait taken at the Boxerwood estate during the burial of her father's ashes.

“My mother is holding my father’s ashes and we are preparing to place the urn in the crypt. Noon, May 28, Saturday. I set up the camera to take a photo as a keepsake. Not an easy task with this crowd... We are all tired, sad and ready for a drink. I had time for one photo, and I asked our friend Hunter to release the shutter after I prepared the camera and returned to the subjects being photographed. Hesitantly saying, “Smile,” she pressed the trigger. The old Goerz Dagor lens let in the light for one tenth of a second. That's all. Two days later I developed the film."

“If my pictures are in the public space and if you see eroticism in them, this is a problem of your perception or a matter of your incorrect adult interpretations.”

In 1977, the first solo exhibition of the American artist took place. It took place in Washington, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The year 1984 for Sally Mann was marked by the end of work on the Second Sight series and the publication of a photo album of the same name. But these events went virtually unnoticed by the public and caused a weak reaction from art critics. In 1988, Sally Mann released her second photo album, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, dedicated to girls of adolescence, which caused a mixed reaction from the public. Her next book, Immediate Family, published in 1992, received an equally controversial but much stronger reaction. The album consisted of photographs of Sally Mann's husband and three children, which, according to the photographer and admirers of her talent, were presented in "innocent childish poses", and according to a number of critics and various committees for the protection of children's rights, these poses were "overtly erotic" .

The photographs, which depicted teenagers sleeping, playing, scantily clad, and sometimes completely naked, evoked a feeling of serenity, talking about the past, about warm summers and childhood, which was now distant and irrevocable. On the other hand, they prompted ambiguous thoughts, dual associations dictated by the rather mature poses of the children. The hidden and overt fears that any parent might feel about their child were realized with eidetic clarity in Sally Mann's photographs.

In addition to moral issues, Sally Mann's work raised personal and legal issues. Some critics have gone even further, declaring the artist's photographs from the series "Close Relatives" to be veiled child pornography: "If, according to her, the main purpose of motherhood is to protect children from all kinds of harm, why is she deliberately depriving her children of the right to choose not to be public? Why put them at risk by showing their private photos to a world where pedophilia exists? Can young children consciously give their consent and take part in the taking of such controversial portraits, even if the artist is their parent?

Discussions around Sally Mann's work will continue for a long time- viewers and critics are still arguing about the motives that preceded the appearance of the photographs of the American artist. Were the sensual images that we see in the photographs obtained as a result of the natural behavior of children or formed by the fantasies of the author specifically for the audience? Is it a desire to shock the public, risk, courage, or a willingness to photograph something that most people were ashamed of when they became adults? Sally Mann’s articulation is quite logical: “These are innocent childish poses. Look at your family albums of you and your parents without diapers. If my photographs are in public space and if you see eroticism in them, this is a problem of your perception or a matter of your incorrect adult interpretations. I always look at people and places that I am partial to, I look at the same time with ardent passion and with a frank aesthetic, cold assessment. I look with passion in my eyes and heart, but in this ardent heart there must also be a piece of ice. Most of the pictures are of things and people that I love, that fascinate and touch me, but that doesn't mean they're easy for me to see or do. Like Flaubert, I have two sacred rules in my work: sinfulness and perfection. The first is usually innate, the second has to be achieved. Besides the usual “coincidence of chance” that sometimes rewards work, making art requires perseverance, an absurd combination in the character of a hummingbird and a bulldozer, and, most of all, practice. Observation practices,” she wrote in response to further accusations.

But criticism, on the one hand, did not subside, and on the other, did not at all interfere with the growth of her popularity. In 2004, a new scandal erupted around the name of Sally Mann, which, like the previous ones, added to her popularity - the exhibition “What Remains” was held at the Washington Museum of Art. The five-part exhibition included more than 90 works. There you could see pictures of half-decomposed corpses, mysterious landscapes and incredibly beautiful portraits of people. “Death is powerful,” said Sally Mann at the opening of the exhibition, “and is best seen as a point from which life can be seen more fully. That’s why my project ends with photographs of living people, my own children.”

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Sally Mann received a large number of prestigious awards, Time magazine named her "America's Best Photographer" in 2001 - Mann's photographs appeared twice on the cover of this publication. Perhaps no other photographer has enjoyed such success in the art world - Sally Mann's work is included in the permanent collections of many museums, among them: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Sun Museum of Modern Art -Francisco, MoMa, Whitney Museum in New York, etc.

Mann became the subject of two documentaries directed by Steve Cantor. The film "Blood Ties" debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994 and was nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Documentary Short Subject". The second film, “Remains,” made by the same director, was first shown in 2006. This film was nominated for an Emmy as best documentary in 2008.

In 2009, a series of photographs, Proud Flesh (“Proud Flesh”), was published - this is a six-year study of her husband’s muscular dystrophy and the story of the delicate relationships of close people, in which one is terminally ill. The project was also received ambiguously by art critics, but was successfully demonstrated at Larry Gagosian's gallery in October of the same year. Here’s what Sally Mann herself says about the “Proud Flesh” project:

“I am a woman who looks. In traditional stories, women who stare, especially those who stare at men, are punished. Remember the unfortunate Psyche, forever punished because she dared to lift the lantern to see her lover.

I think of countless men, from Bonnard to Callahan, who photographed their wives and lovers, but I find it difficult to find parallel examples among photographers of my gender. An appraising look at a man, looking him in the eye on the street, asking him to photograph him, studying his body have always been seen as shamelessness on the part of a woman, while the same actions on the part of a man are ubiquitous and even expected.

I've been staring at my husband ever since he first walked into the room where I was sitting on a worn chenille sofa in some student apartment. My eyes rested on him with keen interest, furtively studying this tall man. Six months later we got married. It was forty years ago, and the first thing I did was take a photograph of him.

But this one long story did not make my work on “Proud Flesh” any easier. You can beat around the bush rhetorically, but at the root of any interaction between photographer and model is exploitation, even forty years later. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and powerful the act of taking a photo is, how it is loaded with concepts like honesty, responsibility, power and ownership, and that so many good images come, in one way or another, from the model.

It is a testament to Larry's great dignity and courage that he allowed me to take these photos. It was quite possible that the gods would have knocked the lantern from my upraised hand as the man lay before me, naked and exposed, like a wretch, stretched out on a mythical mountain infested with predators. At our age, when the peak of life is past and we are left with our sinews and flabby bodies, Larry bears with high divine nobility the grief of the early onslaught of muscular dystrophy. That he did this so willingly is both touching and terrifying."

One of Sally Mann's current projects is called the Marital Trust. This is a photographic history of the details of the family life of Sally and her husband, covering a period of thirty years of their married life. The project is a continuation of the “Proud Flesh” series of works; final dates for implementation or an exhibition have not yet been announced.

TEXT: Yaroslav Solop