Sally Mann’s “Proud Flesh”

Sally Mann, one of the world’s most respected – and at times, controversial – photographers, continues to push photographic boundaries with her newest series, Proud Flesh. On display at New York’s Gagosian Gallery beginning this week and in book form thanks to Aperture next month, Proud Flesh is often solemn and at times otherworldly, but maintains Mann’s signature, haunting beauty throughout.

With “Proud Flesh” she turns her camera away from earlier subjects – childhood, adolescence, life and death, landscape, history – and considers the relationship between husband and wife, turning the tables on the traditionally male artist-dominated lover studies, with a series dedicated to her husband of almost 40 years, Larry Mann.

The series took almost six years to shoot, and reveals a powerfully trusting relationship. Mr. Mann, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, is portrayed in a myriad of manners, suggestive of a relationship of this length – sometimes tenderly, sometimes erotically, at times powerful and godlike, and other times with brutal frankness and vulnerability. It is a complete and honest study.

Mann used a 19th century wet plate process called collodion for the photographs. As she says, “It’s so tetchy and finicky. If you get a little particle of dust in there, or a slight breeze in your darkroom, you get stripes or marks…I do pray for those serendipitous effects.” Such effects lend Proud Flesh a sense of history or legacy, and the series is far more beautiful for these apparitions.

As Sally Mann writes, ”Most of the pictures I take are of the things I love, the things that fascinate and compel me, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to look at or take … I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.”

“And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove too far away from the light to do him any good on a cold winter afternoon, that Larry and I began this work of exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, and to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, two fingers of bourbon, the smell of the ether, the two of us—still in love, still at work.”
-Anna Carnick, Clear Editor