Breeding and Writing: Sally Mann and the ethics of being a parent artist

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

Most of us are committed to our art. We are diehard creators.

And of course, those of us who have offspring are wholeheartedly devoted to our kids.

If they’re ever pitted against each other, who wins?

Many accused photographer Sally Mann of choosing one over the other. Ironically, depending on which critic you read, she either chose her craft to the exclusion of her kids or her kids over her artistic credibility.

Tough place to be.

Mann’s most controversial work was Immediate Family, a book comprised of pictures of her kids in the twilight of their childhoods as each teetered between innocence and adolescence. (This article covers the basics pretty well.)

The alarming bit? Many of the photos are nude shots.

They are all breathtaking, arresting pictures.

The real question is whether that makes it okay to publish them.

One shows us her daughter, fast asleep in a bed she has wet. It’s a beautiful, almost spiritual vignette of the moment between oblivious rest and the bodily shame at having let go. Another of the photographs, and the one which is frequently cited as being more disturbing than the others, is a full-frontal of her young son with popsicle drips running down his inner thigh. There are also photos of her children running, playing, scampering, swimming, jumping; some have clothes separating them from their world, others do not. It’s honest childhood at its best, even as the kids are burgeoning into their own eventual sexuality, which she does not shy away from for a second.

It’s as if she sees them as future adults in the making, and never as children of her own possession. I try daily to see my son that way, too. I admire that. I constantly remind myself that I’m just a stop along his way, and that I’m not the end-all-be-all to him that he is to me. He is not mine to own. I am only his carrier to the future. He belongs to himself, no matter how much of my soul I invest.

As Noelle Oxenhandler put it, and more eloquently than I can:

Looking through the black-and-white photographs of these children, I get the same feeling I’ve had looking at certain long-ago photographs of Native Americans, portraits that managed to preserve that fleeting moment when a conquered people still rest so deeply in their own dignity that they can stare back into the eye of the conquering people with a look that says, There is something about me that will never be yours.

Is that what Mann means, too? Or are we being fooled?  Does she, in fact, see these half-grown people as her personally-made, fully-owned children, and therefore grant herself the absolute right to take pictures of them as she pleases?

When Time Magazine named her America’s Best Photographer in 2001, they said:

Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play. What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events. No other collection of family photographs is remotely like it, in both its naked candor and the fervor of its maternal curiosity and care.

Is it responsible, though? Or should art even try to be?

Mann’s Wikipedia entry includes this contrasting snippet:

One image of her 4 year old daughter (Virginia at 4) was censored by the Wall Street Journal with black bars over her eyes, nipples and vagina. Mann herself considered these photographs to be “natural through the eyes of a mother, since she has seen her children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry and even naked.”

Are these moments of purity which a loving mother carefully froze in their innocence?

Or are they salacious child porn taken only for shock value and career-furthering?

Those in either thought camp will swear they hold the only viewpoint.

Personally, I don’t know. The shots are inarguably beautiful, and I’d like to believe they were taken for the right reasons. I wasn’t there; I don’t know her intentions, only what I’ve read after the fact.

If I view them from the perspective of the kid I used to be, they are amazing and exactly accurate of how I remember my world feeling at ten, twelve, fourteen. It’s proof of the minute between when I was allowed to run freely around the yard without a shirt (and without a second thought) in front of my cousins and when changing clothes in gym class started to terrify me.

And as a mother, I want to document every opportune moment of life with my son, be that beautiful or messy. (Ask my poor, inundated Facebook friends. Sorry, guys.) They’re all worthwhile to me, and later on, I want to be able show him bits of our real life together, not just a polished scrapbook of Sundays in Pleasant Valley.  I have photos of snot, of food clinging to his face in disgusting ways as he smiles beneath the muck, of his terrified expression during his first ER visit. I’ve photographed funerals we went to, injuries he’s had, funny things he’s puked on, and crying fits. Yes, I have bathtub pics, too.

But I do know that in today’s climate, I’d be afraid to publish photos like that of my child, mostly because the laws become so fuzzy and so immediately drastic, especially in the area of nude photos. And Mann has certainly gambled on dodging those laws.

I read not too long ago of a family who lost custody of their kids, ages 5, 4, and 1, and endured investigations and public name-bashing for having their toddlers’ naked bathtub pics developed at Wal-Mart. They eventually won their case (just barely!) but were not allowed to see their children for a month in the meantime. A month! That’s forever when your child is that young—a baby changes every week, every day. Eighteen months of age in particular, as this baby was, is exactly when separation anxiety hits, too.  But sorry, you can’t live with Mommy right now. You just go live over here now while we do all the paperwork.

This mother missed a block of her child’s infancy because of a bath pic. You don’t get to go back and live those days again. They’re just gone. Lost forever. Not to mention the fact that the parents were both listed as sex offenders on the online registry, and the mom lost her teaching job for a year while everything was being settled. A handful of playful bathtime pictures ruined their lives, careers, friendships, and some of their children’s earliest memories of stability.

For those reasons, I’m even nervous writing this blog post and linking to Mann’s images. I’m that paranoid now. We are supposed to deny that part of parenthood, and we are told that overwhelmingly every day.

But does that make ignoring it right?

As artists, shouldn’t we document life as it really happens? Are all things to be filtered for political correctness? Does that change when we become someone’s parent, or are our lives still our own?

Is Mann a brave pioneer? Or someone who selfishly sold her kids out to make a name for herself?

What do you think?