Critical Review of Sally Mann's 'Immediate Family' /Introduction - Nicola Bayes

When beginning to read Sally Mann's introduction to 'Immediate Family', I was instantly hit with the idea of home and family within the first line, which seemed to be singled out from the first of ten paragraphs. After this, Mann leads with a few facts about where she grew up and describes the surroundings in beautiful detail, almost like introduction of a novel.

Throughout the ten paragraphs leading up to a collection of fifty-three black and white photographs, Mann states that she remembers 'the heat' whilst growing up in south-western Virginia. This made me reconsider whether the controversial nude images of her three children, which I slightly believed to be a shock tactic, could be completely innocent and a normality within her family. But is it morally wrong of Mann to publish nude photographs of her children for all the world to see? Did the children have their say on the matter, even in there adolescence?

I feel throughout the introduction, it gives us a strong insight of her children's childhood, from the highs to lows. But I can't help but wonder, did these children want to be photographed? One of the last photographs to be included within the sequence was of Mann's son, Emmet. He is waste-level within a lake of some-sort, with a rather chillingly serious expression on his face, with a caption of 'The Last Time Emmett Modelled Nude, 1987'

Whether you feel Mann's work is controversial or not, you cannot deny her photography and texts capture the innocence of a child in a spectacular way. 262