To date, I think the artist with whom I draw the most parallels would be Sally Mann. The discussion around her work has mostly concerned pornography, photography and representations of children. My images are not as overtly sexual as many of hers, but I do not steer away from this area deliberately. Jane Fletcher’s paper Uncanny Resemblances provides a useful analysis of Mann’s work through Cixous’ notion of a blurring of the boundaries between binary oppositions that prop up patriarchal society and suggests that Mann’s pictures allow the co-existence of what is traditionally considered diametrically opposed. She analyses three of Mann’s photographs, The Wet Bed, Fallen Child and Virginia in the Sun in these terms and concludes by considering Mann’s role as a mother and photographer, and photography’s relation to the ‘real’. I do not propose to recount Fletcher’s analysis here, but here are some of her comments about the work that interested me:
‘Through every day events which every mother has seen, the photographs provoke a feeling of strangeness, a ‘dread and horror’ which is elusive but insistent. ‘
‘It is disconcerting because of the contradictory states of childish innocence and adult sexuality that it simultaneously points to.’
‘It is tender and terrible simultaneously. The familiar becomes unnervingly unfamiliar.’
‘Mann expresses the contradictions that are inherited from a romantic myth that positions children as sexless and childhood as eternal. In doing so, she reveals and perpetuates simultaneously a crisis in how we depict and consume pictures of children.’
‘It is no coincidence that Mann, as one who moves across a set of prescribed opposites herself artist/creator versus mother/procreator – should engage with the contradictions of childhood that her children exhibit. Nor, unfortunately, is it a surprise that critics accused her of bad-mothering in a final attempt to discredit her troubling images. If we acknowledge that the distinction made between photographer and mother is not in actuality clear cut belongs, instead, to a specific system of binary thought, Immediate Family once again subverts an ideal; the ideal of motherhood.’
‘Immediate Family ‘violates’ sentimentalised images of childhood and also dispels notions of the mother as secondary to the child: secondary and silenced. Mann is an ambitious practitioner and a proud mother… To mother and to photograph cease to be two distinct occupations; they sustain one another. In doing so, they upset our cherished ideas about what motherhood and childhood should entail.’
Finally: ‘Photography’s relation to the real has always been disputed. Linked to its referent like a child is linked to its mother, the photograph is both truth and not truth, reality and representation.’
‘Through every day events which every mother has seen, the photographs provoke a feeling of strangeness, a ‘dread and horror’ which is elusive but insistent. ‘
‘It is disconcerting because of the contradictory states of childish innocence and adult sexuality that it simultaneously points to.’
‘It is tender and terrible simultaneously. The familiar becomes unnervingly unfamiliar.’
‘Mann expresses the contradictions that are inherited from a romantic myth that positions children as sexless and childhood as eternal. In doing so, she reveals and perpetuates simultaneously a crisis in how we depict and consume pictures of children.’
‘It is no coincidence that Mann, as one who moves across a set of prescribed opposites herself artist/creator versus mother/procreator – should engage with the contradictions of childhood that her children exhibit. Nor, unfortunately, is it a surprise that critics accused her of bad-mothering in a final attempt to discredit her troubling images. If we acknowledge that the distinction made between photographer and mother is not in actuality clear cut belongs, instead, to a specific system of binary thought, Immediate Family once again subverts an ideal; the ideal of motherhood.’
‘Immediate Family ‘violates’ sentimentalised images of childhood and also dispels notions of the mother as secondary to the child: secondary and silenced. Mann is an ambitious practitioner and a proud mother… To mother and to photograph cease to be two distinct occupations; they sustain one another. In doing so, they upset our cherished ideas about what motherhood and childhood should entail.’
Finally: ‘Photography’s relation to the real has always been disputed. Linked to its referent like a child is linked to its mother, the photograph is both truth and not truth, reality and representation.’
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