Last week I attended a screening of a film about Sally Mann and her five part photographic project, “What Remains.” The first time I saw “What Remains,” a beautiful group of photographs on death and memory and the southern landscape, was at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta. The gallery is a little converted cottage on a wooded street nestled in the heart of the city, and despite its busy surroundings it is a silent place where the only sounds are the creaks and pops and scuffing sounds the hardwood floor makes as patrons walk in the small rooms and under the gabled passages of the space. I’d like to paint the memory of this particular visit as one made during a typical southern day - hot, oppressingly humid, quiet, with the sun just in that certain position in the sky where it punches orange and yellow blazing beams through the thick canopy of leaves in the trees. But I can’t really say it was that way. I have no real recollection of the time of the year, only an impression that was made more by place and image than anything else. And that’s the thing about great pictures - they can generate or supplant feeling, replace memories, or act as markers of memories that you might have never remembered in the first place.
So goes Sally Mann’s work. It manages to express a sense of loss without explicitly communicating what was lost, and defines a place in a way that a fuzzy memory makes a place you hardly know feel like home. Mann’s pictures hold a tangible, yet invisible, weight and sing the sweet romance and melancholy of the southern gothic. She says, “When I am in the pastures making my own images it is the light that leads into suspended time. The photographs created there in that oneiric warp embrace time and memory and become the still point at which they intersect. As always, that stillness brings longing and a dizzying, time-unraveling spiral into the radical light of the American South.” During the film, and again following the screening during a Q&A, Mann said, “as a southerner you’re given the freedom to be romantic,” and I like that. I’m not quite sure who gave her the power to make such a decree, but I really liked hearing a validated, successful artist free up an avenue leading away from all the years of heady art school critiques and cold postmodern criticism and towards something that is so much more natural. Romance is part of this southern boy, just as its part of the southern landscape, and I think its time to make some art that reflects it.
