Sally Mann
Before Words
The exhibition Before Words brings together several of Sally Mann's most emblematic series in portraiture and landscape. Throughout her carrer, Mann has explored diverse concepts of mortality and memory, capturing the tensions and affinities among subject, nature, history, and memory.
Before Words brings together imagery from At Twelve (1983-1985), Immediate Family (1984-1994), and the landscapes of Virginia (1992-1996), Georgia (1996) and the Deep South (1998), as well as more recent works such as Faces (2004) and Proud Flesh (2006-2015). This exhibition is a journey not only to the heart of her visual language, but also to the heart of time.
This issue of fleeting and treacherous time is fundamental to Sally Mann's work, which constantly challenges the dialectic of immediacy and permanence, life and death, individual and collective history. It is at the crossroads of these times, at their confluence, that only the image can, however momentarily, capture the sensitive, sacred, etymological dimension of the world. No words can reach this place.
A few signs, cosmic convergences, emerge in Sally Mann's images, distilled like sunspots; brief, bright disturbances that alter the permanence of things, piercing and destabilizing their meaning. A dark gash in the trunk of a tree, a bite mark, black orbs in the shape of bullet holes that pierce the image against a battlefield backdrop -these vivid marks are redolent of the words written by William Faulkner in The Sound and The Fury (1929). They speak of dark visions and plumb the horrific remnants of the American Civil War, of the crimes and violence perpetrated against minorities, of Emmett Till's martyrdom on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, the great burnt swamps of the South, of segregation, slavery and racism. Here, in Virginia and the Deep South, history and human memory lie still smoldering in the depths of the earth. Sally Mann's images are crystalline impressions, imprints bearing these deep truths that she brings up to our eyes. They will live on through the centuries, and enrich our collective memory.
Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants and the Prix Pictet. Her work is held by major institutions internationally. Working since the 1970s, Sally Mann is perhaps best known for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South and for her intimate portraits of her family. Her work has attracted controversy at time, but its influence is enduring. Since her first solo exhibition in 1977, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., she has attracted a diverse and devoted audience.
All photographs: ©Sally Mann. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, NY
