The black roots in Sally Mann’s Swamp Bones certainly seem more carcass than tree. But a cadaver, with its mass of rotting flesh flopped belly down like the ones Mann’s photographed elsewhere, seems a far too physical comparison. Surrounded by
The black roots in Sally Mann’s Swamp Bones certainly seem more carcass than tree. But a cadaver, with its mass of rotting flesh flopped belly down like the ones Mann’s photographed elsewhere, seems a far too physical comparison. Surrounded by swirling white mist, this is a graveyard that surely hails from some unearthly ghost world – a memorial landscape of the mind. Its eerie, bleached-out quality is partly due to intrusions of light from flaws in the camera lens, which serve as testament to the passage of time. Created with an antique 8-by-10 view camera like those photographers first used in the 1800s to document America’s Civil War, it’s an image that stretches far back into the tangled morbid history of The South.
One of the world’s most celebrated photographers, Mann is perhaps still best-known and a little notorious, for the nude images of her children that so provoked critics and shot her to fame in the early 1990s. In these artfully staged works her three prepubescent kids lark around their home, in dirt lanes, wild woods and by inviting lakesides. Depicted in gorgeous silvery black and white, with ferocious eyes, smooth tanned skin and ballsy demeanour, they’re the epitome of lithe, semi-feral, innocent beautiful youth.
A born and bred Southerner herself, Mann asserts the scenery giving shape to their childhood as far more than a backdrop. In series like The South, from which Swamp Bones is taken, she would turn her attentions to her home’s tormented landscape. Trees are shown battle-scarred with deep, dark gashes while buildings crumble like ancient ruins discovered in the jungle. It’s classic Southern Gothic, fusing the literary tradition with photography’s long established association with history and death.
Sally Mann: The Family and The Land is at the Photographer’s Gallery, London until 19 September.
