Sally Mann's "Southern Landscapes"

Sally Mann’s Southern Landscapes

This body of work is called Southern Landscapes the series includes photographs of landscapes in West Virginia where Sally Mann, the artist, was born and raised.  The landscape photographs were taken over a period of about eight years in the 1990s. Sally Mann takes most of her photos in West Virginia; many are taken at or around her house. Sally Mann is very attached to her home and state where she had grown up and raised and watched her children grow up as well, the state of West Virginia. She usually only takes pictures in her home state and around her home in Lexington West Virginia.

Mann’s first popular work included artistically laid out portraits of her family.  This is what made her such a well-known artist. This particular piece of work, Southern Landscapes, was never shown in its own exhibition but many of her other works have.

This body of work shows the landscapes in a different way than we are used to seeing them.  The images bring out the eeriness and death in the landscapes, which would normally be thought of as beautiful.  When I think of landscapes I think of large open spaces with a horizon line two-thirds up the page or two thirds down. Sally Mann’s landscapes do not all necessarily have a horizon line; Her images have a glow to them which I think makes them look like there was fog everyday that she took the pictures.  I like this because it adds to the overall eerie and death feel in the picture.  An image that I think of when I think of her images is the image taken in 1998 (number 12 on her website), it looks like it could have been a graveyard from a horror movie; it has the fog, the dead trees and the soft focus makes everything unclear and questionable.

The prints are black and white; they have a shallow depth of and have a soft focus to them like the images in the pastoralist movement.  Although, they have a soft focus some of the textures are very clear and are in focus. There is a border like edge going around the image, this border is black and has soft edges, and the border rounds the corners of the photograph.  The reason for this border is not because she puts it there but because the images were taken with a bellows camera. This camera puts this border around images because of the round lens.  Using this old camera and process caused imperfections on many of her photos. Sally Mann says that she actually likes these marks and damages that the process causes, it adds character to the image and makes each one unique. I am not sure about the size of her images but I do know that because of the process in which she prints the final images, the prints, will come out similar to the size of the negatives.   The way she prints her photographs is in a darkroom.  She takes a darkroom with her wherever she goes, much like the traveling photographers in the late 1800s lots of the negatives she develops are processed right in the back of her car.  Not in this work but in her more recent works sally Mann has been printing daguerreotypes as her method of printing images.

Most of the photographs in this body of work are similar to the photographs from the pastoralist movement, they are soft focus and have a painting like look to them but, at the same time parts of each image are very sharp like some of the artists and photographers from group F64.  And image that comes to mind is the image labeled 1996 (number 13 on her website), this image is mostly soft focus except for the vines on the tree, that particular part of this photograph reminds my of Edward Weston’s photograph of the Paper. I think the ideas behind her works are more like modernist photography in that she was taking a picture to take a picture, in other words, it was photography about photography rather than photography to tell us something. They did end up looking very painterly but that was not the original idea behind it.  Her paragraphs were also pre-visualized she set everything up around the subject and she knew what she wanted it to look like before she took the picture. The process is one from the 1850s similar to the collotypes types it is processed in a darkroom just like they did in the 1850s.

I do not think this body of work had a certain message or idea behind it, I think she just went out to takes a series of pictures.  However, whether Mann meant to or not, her photos did reveal a couple things about her.  This series starts to show us her obsession with death, the fact that she is able to take a beautiful landscape and turn it into a place that looks deathly.  In her works that follow more and more of her obsession is revealed to us; she takes pictures of the bones of her dead dog, and she goes to a graveyard and takes pictures of the dead people.  These landscapes also show us her attachment to child hood; all of her pictures were taken around where she grew up, and where her children grew up.  Sally Mann grew up with big open spaces to live and play so, naturally, she would want to capture those memories in her photographs.  Landscapes are free open spaces; it is nice that Mann took pictures of places she could relate to.

            Sally Mann is one of my favorite photographers, I can relate to her work and the process she uses, she has inspired me in some way for most of my pieces whether I am taking pictures of my family or just developing an ordinary picture in the darkroom.  Lots of her images relate back to her obsession with death and I think that is why mine do as well because I get most of my ideas from looking at her work.

Links:

http://sallymann.com/selected-works/southern-landscapes (Sally Mann’s Website)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNEd93H4pPY (part 1 of her movie What Remains)

Panoramas

These images are panoramic pictures, each of the images breaks down an action into steps.  The idea and propose of making these pictures was to make the viewer wonder about how I took the picture and how I could put the same person in one picture multiple times.  I thought of this Idea for my fantasy projects because it challenges the idea of time; according to these pictures the action that the "model", I guess you could call them, is performing was supposed to happen over a period of time but in these pictures the action, if you can still consider it an action, is happening all at once.

                    To create these images I  put several pictures together to make a panorama picture.  In each of these shots I moved the person in front of the camera  into the pose I wanted them to be in.  When I matched up the background and put all the images together this was how it turned out.  It did turn out almost exactly as I had planed with out any trouble.  I had this idea from the beginning of the project and i stuck with it the whole time.

                   I had a lot of fun with this project, it turned out how I had planed and seeing the reactions of the people looking at the photos makes me excited.  There have been several people asking how I took them and how I was able to put the same person in the same picture, which was exactly the reaction I was looking for. 

Portraiture

For my portraits I had collage students sit down on a chair while I had the shutter open.  After about 20 seconds I put a lens cap over the lens and asked them to switch.  The student moved their chair sideways and looked at the wall rather than the camera.  I then uncovered the lens cap for about 20 seconds and there was my shot.  I did not go into this project knowing exactly how it was going to turn out or with a definite idea of what I was trying to communicate.  I did know that the photos were going to have a more painted look to them, with the shutter open it's almost impossible to have a still image. I knew that there were going to be two of the same person on each image. I knew I was going to photograph college students.

After starting the project I noticed more things in my photographs.  The person looking at the wall on almost every image was more blurry than when they were looking at the camera.  The pictures were not turing out light enough, when I would open the shutter for too long the background was too light, when  I shortened the amount of time that the shutter was open the student would be too dark.  I went with an in-between time, 20 seconds, this made the background dark enough to were I knew I could edit it to make it darker and the subject light enough so I could make them lighter.

I chose to do my portraits like this because I have never seen anything like this before.  I have seen mug shots that are similar with one picture looking at the camera and one looking sideways, like mine.  Mine are different though, those were two separate pictures, the pictures I took of each person were one picture.  I think it is really cool that the people are blurry in these portraits, I think it adds mystery to the photo because you can't see all the details.  It also individualizes each person, each picture is shot the same yet, because each person moved differently in the pictures, there is something unique about each of the portraits.

My Brain

The theme of my project was exploring my brain.  I wanted to show people how the way I think effects my surroundings.  My brain and the way I think is very unorganized and this last picture shows that with my messy room.  I have tried to clean my room and keep it clean several times but my brain seems to like the organization better than a nice looking room.  This is the only image in full color because it is reality.

 I am the only one who is able to interpret and find things in my room.  This is also true about my brain I am the only one who can find out more about myself.  Many times when I’m talking I will say something and I clearly understand what I’m saying but no one else does.  This is why I took the close up pictures of the things in my room. Each of these close up pictures say something about me.  It is very hard for the viewer to depict what these objects are, this is how I related the idea of only me knowing what is in my brain to my project.  I know what is in all of these pictures and I know what they say about me but the viewer does not.  I put these images in black and white simply because i love seeing things in black and white.  Some of these pictures have spurts of color in them to show that I have spurts of energy that just pop out like the colors in The picture. 

  This project went exactly as planed, I did not have to change what I was thinking to fit the pictures.  I wanted people to see something unorganized and here it is. I was not sure if I wanted to make everything black and white however when I first started editing, but I love it so much I just couldn't stay away from it.

            

Assignment 2

"Frame"

"Fast Shutter Speed"

"Slow Shutter Speed"

"Night Photography With Tripod"

These two images are focusing on two different
 objects but are in the same photo

Hand held with slow shutter speed

"Vantage Point"

"Detail" 

"The Thing Itself"
This photo is showing the how crazy life has become in college.
This relates to "The Thing Itself " because it is exaggerating
 how hectic life is and how our world is surrounded by
technology and in this case the computer

"Flash"

Assignment 1 photographs

Materializing New Space

Separately their pieces were wonderful but together they are amazing.  They are not only combining both Jamie and Kelly’s skills but their ideas and separate worlds.  From Kelly’s side we saw her creativity through her paintings and drawings, the fantasy and unreal world she imagines that is so wonderful.  And from Jamie’s side, we have his life like and real designs, like for the mechanical bird wings. Combining the two is just a taste of what everyone wants in life, a little bit of real and a little bit fantasy.  When the two ideas are together they create a perfect world. 

            The brick pieces that involved stock show us how reality is a huge impact on art.  I loved how they used their real stock and made it into such great works of art. 

            My favorite pieces were the bird nests.  Not only did they make a three-dimensional piece and worked it in with the ending result which was a two-dimensional piece but to make it they used left over parts to their old project.  This brings up recycling materials, another big part of our world today and just another way they were able to tie in our world to the world they have created through their art. 

            I was glad I was able to see their show and what made it even better was being able to hear their lecture.  Listening to were it all started and were their work and ideas were coming from made their art much more enjoyable to look at.