Sally Mann

“Pain,” writes Rilke, “tolerates no interpretation.  Nature is completely unaware that it causes us pain...and because nature does not take our consciousness into consideration, it becomes our task not to dissolve pain into our consciousness.  It appears that one has to let pain burn itself out wherever it happens, without trying to understand any matters of the mind or life in the light of its flickering blaze.”  For Rilke, physical pain is the presence within us of a force of nature greater than us and indifferent to us.  To attempt to interpret pain—to hitch its incomprehensibility to human purposes, to transfer its ruthlessness to the side of inspiration—is to misunderstand it categorically.  We endure pain and sometimes come through it, but our survival, for Rilke, does not redeem our suffering, or transform it into something other than what it is.

Sally Mann, whose riveting photographs on her husband’s physical degeneration are currently on view at Jackson Fine Art, is preoccupied with just such existential concerns:  physical pain as it ruptures and then manifests faithfulness to life, love as it alternately diminishes and magnifies awareness of our mortality.  To say that Mann’s husband is the subject of these pictures is both true and misleading.  Her deeper subject is the struggle to grasp how human virility—beginning from the body of the one she loves—comes to exist in damaged and unrecognizable forms, requiring inventive acts of searching to reconstitute the greater unity without which human flesh would be simply be the raw evidence of an absurd universe.

The photographs of Mann’s husband synthesize three major currents of her work over the past thirty years, some of which are also on view in the gallery.  Mann came to international prominence with narratively complex images of her own family that frequently explore eros and death in childhood (At Twelve, 1988 and Immediate Family, 1992).  She then moved to a series of images of putrefying corpses and carcasses in natural settings, including several made at a research facility for studying human decomposition (What Remains, 2003), and brooding landscapes that attempt to reckon with the persistence of loss in Southern consciousness (Deep South, 2005).  For much of the landscape work, as for the new work of her husband, Mann has used the antiquarian wet-plate process, a laborious and technically difficult photographic medium in which the photographer mixes a collodion emulsion, coats it on glass plates and exposes it in a large-format camera while still wet, then processes it immediately after exposure.  Many of the most magisterial American landscape photographs of the nineteenth century were made using this process—Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs of the Southwest and Carleton Watkins’ mammoth plate studies of California and the Pacific Northwest, among others.  Mann prizes the wet-plate not for its optical detail but for the imperfections of which it is uniquely capable, much as other artists since the 1970s have cherished the manipulability of the Polaroid process, and the Photo-Secessionists (Mann’s kindred spirits from the art world of a hundred years ago) embraced gum-bichromate.  While Mann cannot be credited with reinventing wet-plate, she has explored its potential more fully than any American artist of the last many decades.

In one way or another, all of the photographs in this show beg the question of what a photographic picture “should” look like:  it is immediately apparent that for Mann, optical sharpness claims only a share, often a comparatively small share, in lens-given images.  Pictures, for Mann, occur when affect  somehow comes to reside in the churn of photography’s optical and chemical effects.  There are methods for divining this affect within the creative moment, ways of coaxing it forth from the energy between artist and sitter, but there is no formula for claiming it, and no photograph that really “captures” it by allowing us to witness it in some way.  Mann’s explorations of her husband—I am loath to call them portraits—begin from visual irresolution and retain disturbance on their surfaces and in their depths.  On their surfaces:  Mann courts all manner of blemishes and smirches for their expressive potential, creating boils and abscesses from the photographic process itself, which surround and sometimes attach to the body (“Discobolus,” 2006, “Hephaestus,” 2008).  In their depths:  Mann’s pictures hold light in keen but contingent ways, much as we might say that glass “contains” whatever light and color shines within and through its particular translucency (“Ponder Heart,” 2009, “Time and the Bell,” 2008, “Semaphore,” 2003).   The imperfections and uncertainties of a fickle photographic process are, for Mann, absolutely necessary to the emotional understanding for which she seeks form.  If Mann were a sculptor, I would expect her to work in warm, opalescent wax filled with debris and bugs, impressible and receptive to the heat of the hands.