The intricate photographic techniques of Sally Mann | Art21

SON: Growing up as a child

of Sally Mann was not easy at all.

Anyone who's as driven as Sally Mann is

is going to be an intense mother.

She's difficult,

and for as much as I get annoyed

and struggle against it and fight it,

I love it at the same time,

so it's such a Yin and a Yang.

MANN: God, it does look like the Shroud of Turin

or something.

It looks so ponderous –

whereas this looks so ephemeral.

God, they're just two different pictures.

Some pictures just have to be a certain way,

but this doesn't seem to cry 
out to be either light or dark.

Which just makes my job harder, actually.

WOMAN:: Every time she looks at something,

she's looking at it as an artist.

It's so much of her energy.

And so I think we lost, to some extent, a mother,

but we gained a friend, 
and an artistic accomplice,

and something entirely different.

MAN: it's a tremendous effort that goes into it.

Sally will have a pile of, what 
I think are beautiful prints,

and those are the rejects,

and I'm sitting here going, god.

This is a tough one.

What I like about these dog 
bones is their ambiguity.

It takes you a while to figure out what they are,

or maybe you don't figure it out.

If it doesn't have ambiguity, 
don't bother to take it.

I mean, I love that, that aspect of photography,

the mendacity of photography.

It's got to have some kind of peculiarity in it

or it's not interesting to me.

–Do right.

–Just stay there.

If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic,

it's sort of a magpie aesthetic, you know.

I just go around and I pick up whatever's around.

It's very spontaneous.

I see a dog bone, I bring it in,

I take a picture, I like the picture.

I took, well, hey, that's a pretty good picture,

so then I go collect all the other dog bones

and I bring them in and I 
take a few more pictures,

and then I put them on the wall,

And then before long, the gallery says,

"Well, let's do a show of dog bones."

So we do a show of dog bones,

and then some, like, cynical post-modern critic

will come along and say,

"Oh, my god, look at the show of dog bones,

what do you suppose it means?"

And that's, ohh! That's a 
good dog. Sure, go get it.

These dog bones are just making art

the way art should be made, I think,

without any overarching reference.

Just for fun, if you can imagine that,

art for fun, sometimes it is fun.

There's a lot of dispute about 
the proper way to hold this glass.

I learned how to do this from a master,

he's just a genius teacher,

and he really knows wet plate collodion.

his name's Mark Osterman.

It's a sort of cranky process.

It doesn't allow for much sloppy technique.

It's hard to get these chemicals.

They're all, you know, controlled.

Collodion and ether, and of course, grain alcohol

you can get, but you can't get it in virginia.

Then you take it to the silver nitrate.

–Whoa, there's a bug in here.

And for reasons that escape me completely,

the silver nitrate sticks to the 
collodion and ether and coats it.

My plates are horribly flawed.

but, of course, it's the flaws I like,

so you pray.

In your prayer, you pray,

please don't let me screw 
it up, but just screw it up

a little bit, just enough to make it interesting.

It's so stupid – I have to use 
one hand to hold my shutter shut,

I have to use a head to 
keep the camera from moving.

There's got to be an easier way.

All right, well, what do you think?

30 seconds, I'd say.

Actually, I'm surprised it took me 
this long to get to this process.

Because I was so immersed in that whole 
glass plate, 19th-century aesthetic.

–I like that one, there's 
Jenna being the weirdo again.

–Sally: Oh, without the splinter?

–Daughter: she's so normal-looking 
now, no one would know that she was...

She was just beautiful, 
and she looked like someone

that stepped out of the wrong century.

–Yeah, great little model, though.

–Daughter: The most incredible little girl.

–Sally: She could put on a 
pout like nobody's business.

–Daughter: She could throw a 
fit like nobody's business.

–Sally: Well, that's true, too.

The way I approach photography, 
it's very spontaneous.

The children were there,

so I took pictures of my children.

It's not that I'm interested 
in children that much,

or photographing them, it's 
just that they were there.

Daughter: She would call 
us her models, but usually

it was just something where she'd say "Freeze,"

and we'd stop what we were doing.

Sometimes she'd make some small alteration,

but that was all.

The one where my hair is on my ribs,

I remember that I had to keep going back

and wetting my hair,

because it would dry and then slip, so...

that's the only thing that I remember.

–Sally: do you remember how

many times we took that picture?
–Daughter: Yes, we… I remember.

–Sally: That was a production, because 
someone had to sit behind you in the river

and thwack the river with the canoe

to make those little ripples that are behind you.

–Man: that's what I was doing.

–Sally: yeah, you were thwacking the river,

and she was standing there keeping her hair

from falling off her ribs.

And still maintaining a beatific expression.

That was a really hard picture to take.

I wanted those family pictures to look effortless.

I wanted them to look like snapshots.

There is something about 
the whole 8 x 10 business.

The sort of reverence that goes along with it,

that you have to, you have to pay your dues

to the photo gods, I guess.

Son: You know, my mother's vision,

she had an idea, it was almost like a dream.

I think she has a dream picture,

and she just gradually, like, refines it

until it's exactly what she's looking for.

It took like five separate trips out here,

and taking, probably, looked 
like 15 to 20 pictures

every single time.

She was looking, every time 
she took a picture of me,

I knew she was looking for that

intensity that I feel my sisters and I have,

My mother has –

it's just like this intensity, Mann intensity,

I don't know what it is, 
it plagues me to this day.

Sally: it was my father who gave me

almost all my cameras, the 
first half-dozen, I guess.

He was an atheist who practiced

compassionate medicine, 60 hours a week.

He was enough of a socialist to believe

you shouldn't have to pay for it if you couldn't.

But he was also an art collector,

I mean, he bought Kandinsky in the '30s,

and Twombly in the '50s.

And he was quite an unusual 
man, and hell to live up to.

But then, of course, my mother...

in all different kinds of poses here.

You couldn't have two more disparate backgrounds.

My mother with this, like, blue-blood New England,

and my father sort of a renegade Texan.

But I was the third child.

Two older brothers.

And I sort of think by the time I came along,

everyone was tired of raising children.

It wasn't that they neglected me,

it was a benign neglect, I guess.

I know I never wore clothes.

They're all, every picture of me is naked.

And they had 12 boxers, so I was always

surrounded by a pack of dogs.

I just ran wild for the first 
seven years of my life –

and then went to school,

and didn't take to it too kindly,

but I was eventually civilized.

I guess that's a little how I raised my own kids.

And a little why I was so nonplussed

when people were so surprised

to see the pictures of my children without shirts

and pants, and running wild, too.

It seemed like a perfectly 
normal thing to do, to me.

Daughter: I don't think I've 
ever seen this one before.

See, that's an example, 
you see your hand in there?

You see how your gesture is?

You didn't have that clunky child thing.

You were so svelte and sylph-like.

Daughter: Everyone looks at these pictures,

and it's like, you must have 
had the most amazing childhood.

We did.

I was literally a water nymph 
until I was 12, I think.

It wasn't magical at the 
time, but looking back on it,

it's kind of like...

But then, you know, she said that all the pictures

started looking like fashion ads.

So, she had to do something else.

Son: I love the landscapes,

I don't have any problem with them.

I was ready to stop getting –

taking pictures.

I was like, ahh, no more taking pictures.

Daughter: I argue that the 
landscapes are going to be

the ones that she's going to be remembered for.

In the end, that's going to be what's going to be

the most lasting body of work.

I don't think so, I think 
immediate family was, actually.

The pictures of us were, actually.

No, I'm just playing.

Because these are the most 
interesting subject matter.

Sally: Well, certainly.

But these have the better skill.

It's funny, 'cause mom's so...

You have to leave, mom.

I feel stupid talking about 
her if she's in the room.

She's, she was raised with no sense of God

in such an atheistic family.

And you'll never hear her say 
anything spiritual or religious.

Spiritual, maybe.

Even then, she's like, I don't 
want to get too touchy-feely.

She's really against that stuff.

But I think it's her bible, it's her expression 
of her spirituality that she can't say

without feeling stupid.

Maybe it's the same thing with immediate family,

sort of a maternal understanding, maternal love,

that's so hard to express, so she took pictures.

Son: I know my mother loves the South,

like there's something just incredible

about places that don't have malls,

and have like a real sense of history.

And I feel like, especially in the United 
States, like that is being destroyed so quickly.

Sally: Of course, I can't see 
anymore because I'm blind.

Do you have your reading glasses, Larry?

Son: Dad is just as much a part of Mom,

their relationship is so much tied with the land,

and I feel like they just are 
really aware of how important

maintaining a sense of 
beauty in what surrounds you.

We can make a print of it.

Man: I just love the feel of the large images.

Often I'll be there when the image is being made.

It's just part of a continuum.

Basically, it's basically pretty good.

It looks nice against the black.

You know, you feel like you're 
intimately involved in the whole process,

yet once that final image hits the 
wall, it's got a life of its own.

It's really, it's a wonderful 
experience altogether.

Sally: ah!
Just a little lighter.

[singing] Over the miles...