Sally mann12/25/2022 Mann’s inspiration for her photographs has always come from her surroundings. She was born in 1951 in West Virginia and still lives there with her husband today (Price, P.1). Sally Mann is an artist who became well-known for the controversial photographs of her three children, Jessie, Emmet, and Virginia. To push a little bit, whether that’s aesthetically, politically, or culturally (McQuaid, p.1).” But it’s also enduring, like a photograph.Sally Mann has been quoted as saying, “Art’s role… is almost nefarious. “The people you love the most,” as Edgar Degas once jotted in his journal, “are the people you could hate the most.” All the emotion attached to this ambivalence - the love, the pain, the humor, the all-of-it - is fleeting, like a bite mark. Apart from being beautiful (“The world is beautiful before it is true,” wrote the philosopher Gaston Bachelard), it reminds us that we are profoundly ambivalent creatures. Children must do battle with them constantly as they undergo the necessary process of growing up and growing away. They’re also tyrannical, self-appointed authorities and sources of incredible frustration. So close that their contours, their meanings are impossible to discern.Ī child’s parents or guardians are fonts of love and protection. To children, parents are, in a sense, like paintings seen up close. Pure, animal aggression? The urge to make an impression? To see what it feels like? To test out authority? Maybe all those things. But both works leave me wondering: Why would anyone bite a thing that is clearly not food? I don’t know quite what connection my mind is making. The picture reminds me, in fact, of an encaustic painting by Jasper Johns called “ Painting Bitten by a Man.” It’s just a small, gray, pasty thing with a bite taken out of it, leaving a shallow cavity striped by teeth marks. It is this that makes the bite marks, when you see them, briefly shocking, almost as if someone had sunk their teeth into the photograph itself. The human subjects in “Jessie Bites” are so close they are cropped, the camera pressed close to their skin. (Mann, in this case, bit her own arm - but that’s okay: artists are allowed to invent!) So Mann and her children usually collaborated on pictures, staging fictions that suggest deeper meanings. They make actual spontaneity all but impossible. The captured moment appears spontaneous, but 8-by-10 view cameras are cumbersome. Shadow encroaches on the picture’s lower half. Mann’s 8-inch-by-10-inch view camera and rich printing capture the richly variegated tones of textured shirt, striped cushions, boa, hair and skin. That’s the way kids’ moods are, right? Three minutes after the moment of the photograph, Jessie, whose smudged and (thankfully) far from indelible body paint and feather boa suggest a great day of play - could be once again running wild, or else sleeping like a fallen warrior. Devastating as it is, I imagine it as fleeting. Both the proximity of Jessie and the extraordinary, aggrieved expression on her face (what a scowl! Naomi Watts, Kristen Stewart, eat your hearts out) suggest that she was responsible. That impression is complicated, however, by the detail that gives the work its title: The adult’s arm is imprinted with a bite mark.
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