An Imaginative Evening with Sally Mann

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Author: Kaitlyn Reeser

Particularly in vibrant cities like Los Angeles, established artists and instrumental figures in the art world are often invited to host gallery openings or showcases. In light of this, I was given the opportunity to design my own evening with an influential artist. After examining my own experience with the arts I decided on Sally Mann. In the past few years, Mann has actually held numerous gallery opening in Los Angeles.

Imagining myself at a gallery opening with American photographer Sally Mann is amusing, to say the least. It’s difficult to see Mann, a brusque but somehow elegant woman in her late 50s wearing anything that remotely resembles an evening gown, not to mention meandering around the long tables of hors d’oeuvres and other fancy things that such events usually entail.

I wonder how it is possible that someone with such a no-frills style can create such hauntingly beautiful work with a camera. When I look at Mann’s photos, I am amazed at how they are ghostlike, ephemeral and starkly honest. I would be more than willing to brave the haughty crowd at a gallery opening in order to spend an evening with Sally Mann and to learn more about what inspires her to do such incredible work.

Mann undoubtedly has been to her share of gallery openings. With her work on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others, Sally Mann has been a major contributor to the photography field for decades. She uses antique cameras from the 1800s and obscure chemicals to process the photos so that they are perfectly transient, mysterious and unique.

In fact, spending an evening with her could potentially be quite an impassioned ordeal. Her work, which has been deemed “controversial” and even “disturbing,” often centers around forms of the human body. One of her most well known series, “Immediate Family,” features portraits of her naked children. She scoffs at assertions that her art is in any way like child pornography, avowing instead that her children were free spirits and she simply photographed them in their most natural state. Maybe one or two of them would even show up to the gallery opening. That might make for some interesting, if not a bit awkward, conversation.

The things I would most like to understand about Sally Mann, however, are perhaps the things that can’t be shared over drinks and fancy snacks at an event. Artists all have a certain way about them – the same mechanism that allows them to express themselves so well through art tends to translate to eccentricities in other areas of their lives. I would love to spend an evening with this visionary woman to learn more about what it means to really live the life of an artist. And although I might never be caught photographing dog bones with an antique camera in the backwoods of Virginia, I would hope that some of Sally Mann’s nonconformist talent might just rub off on me.

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