Immediate Family

"Mann's subjects are her small children (a boy, a girl, and a new baby), often shot when they're sick or hurt or just naked. Nosebleeds, cuts, hives, chicken pox, swollen eyes, vomiting—the usual trials of childhood—can be alarmingly beautiful, thrillingly sensual moments in Mann's portrait album. Her ambivalence about motherhood—her delight and despair—pushes Mann to delve deeper into the steaming mess of family life than most of us are willing to go. What she comes up with is astonishing." —Vince Aletti, The Village Voice, commenting on Immediate Family series

Sally Mann Quote discussing Immediate Family: "These are photographs of my children....Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river."

Mann came out with her notorious third series, Immediate Family in 1992.  Immediate Family consists of photographs picturing her three children.  Many of these shots were taken at their summer cabin along a river where the children were able to run freely even without clothing.  These images evoke several different messages such as solitude, sexuality, death, and uncertainty.  After the release of the series many accused her work of being child pornography and composed images.  Mann claimed that her photographs were from her own perspective as a mother—from seeing her children react in every emotion and seeing them as they came into this world, their natural selves—naked.

Sally Mann, from the Introduction Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland home in Virginia, Sally Mann's extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children-- Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia-- reveal truths that embody the individuality

of her immediate family and ultimately take on a universal quality. Mann states that her work is "about everybody's memories, as well as their fears," a theme echoed by Reynolds Price in his eloquent, poignantly reflective essay accompanying the photographs in Immediate Family.With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Mann's pictures explore the eternal struggle for autonomy-- the holding on, and the breaking away. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made: impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in Sally Mann's astonishing photographs. A traveling exhibition of Immediate Family, organized by Aperture, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in the Fall of 1992. (Source)

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