Subculture as Family - Web (Sally Mann)

Sally Mann - Immediate Family & Family Pictures

Mann's work mainly explores family portraits and snap shops, and develops the idea of without photographs there is no way of looking back and the past and remembering it; you just get told about it and how it happened but there is no actual proof of it. Just like the stories that your family tell about the time you fell over on holiday that time.
A camera has become very important within the family and has helped to shape what we mean when saying the term 'Family'. In America, it was seen as extremely important to have a camera within your household to capture the special moments and memories for the children when they grew up. This is exactly the same as today, as nearly every person carries a camera of sorts, it is seen as a typical piece of technology to own.
However, photographing the family, especially your own is completely different than photography others and/or the public. The are many different ways to photograph families, and they tend to be a lot more open as the photographs usually mean something to them, the person who is photographing will always have a certain was of seeing the image, just like a professional. Sally Mann took this art and decided to bring it to her own idea of family.

Candy Cigarette. 1989

Sally Mann photographed her children at a young age, but the images were not your typical image that a parent would take of their children, never mind let others look at. The photographs Mann took of her children represent some of her childhood memories and not those of her children's life. Mann explains this may be because her father had 'a keen sense of the perverse' as he photographed her nude as a little girl. This could be the main reason as to why women tend to be move favoured as family photographers, as the man of the house would be seen as wrong and not right in doing so. 

"Mann's images of children, manipulated to appear sexualized and physically abused, may say more about repressed memories of her own childhood than of her present relationship with her children. Mann says her father, a man with "a keen sense of the perverse," photographed her in the nude as a young girl. Perhaps the psychologist who attends Mann's children would do better to attend to their mother's repressed childhood traumas and ask why a woman who sexualizes photographs of her children would utter the self-denying pronouncement, "I think childhood sexuality is an oxymoron."

The New York Times, The Photography of Sally Mann, (1992). The Photography of Sally Mann. Available at (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/25/magazine/l-the-photography-of-sally-mann-712292.html?ref=sallymann

Fig2.Mann.S. Family Pictures.


 


Fig3.Mann.S. Family Pictures.

I think that Sally Manns work tells a story of her childrens life and how events portrayed in the photographs do happen, but are never documented by regular photographers and as family snapshots. I think that Manns image have helped to shape the idea of the family subculture, as many people still focus on the good, happy memories that are shown in the family albums and seem to think that things shows in Manns images do not happen because they are not documented.