Volume 41, Number 3 · February 3, 1994
The Family of Mann
By Janet Malcolm
Immediate Family
by Sally Mann, afterword by Reynolds Price
Aperture, unpaginated pp., $40.00; $24.95
The audacity and authority of Sally Mann's work are perhaps nowhere so immediately manifest as on the cover of her first collection of photographs, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). The cover picture is a sort of double portrait: a girl stands in front of a clapboard house next to a chair on which a torn, oval photograph of another girl, from another time, has been propped. The girl in the old photograph wears a flounced dress and a bow in her hair, and has the stern, fixed, mildly sulky expression that nineteenth-century photographers regularly induced in young subjects; her hands are stiffly, self-protectively crossed over her stomach. The 'actual' girl, in contrast, opens herself up to the photographer's scrutiny. Dressed in tight shorts and a T-shirt, she stands in an attitude of trusting relaxation, her legs parted, a hip outthrust, an arm extended to grip the chair holding the torn photograph. We do not see her expression—Mann has cropped the photograph at her chest and her knees—but we don't need to, because the body is so eloquent. Its transfixing feature—you could almost call it its 'face'—is the girl's vulva, which plumply strains against the soft stretch fabric of the shorts, creating a radius of creases that impart a sculptural, almost monumental presence to this evocative, slightly embarrassing, slightly arousing sight of summer in America.
Review, 1740 words
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