Review
"[Mann's photographs] suggest that the camera is adept at depicting the desires of the subconscious as it is in rendering the shapes of everyday life."--Andy Grundberg, the
New York Times"These are photographs of my children. . . . Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river."--Sally Mann, from the Introduction
"[Sally Mann] makes pictures of children--luminously beautiful black-and-white images of mysteriously elfin chidren around [her] rural home in Lexington, Virginia. These are riveting, enigmatic narrative images."--Ken Johnson,
Art in America"Her photographs are imbued with a seductive, surreal Southern sensibility. Like the writers Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, or William Faulkner, she has a great potential for telling stories. Her work pulls you in--it's very beguiling."--Davis Pratt, as quoted in the
Boston Globe"Sally Mann continues to probe the intimate life of her family and come up with startling, disquieting revelations. Mann's extraordinary picture of her nude daughter suspended like a shimmering white fish on a porch with unconcerned adults resonates in your mind like a dream."--Vince Aletti, the
Village Voice
Book Description
"Mann's subjects are her small children (a boy, a girl, and a new baby), often shot when they're sick or hurt or just naked. Nosebleeds, cuts, hives, chicken pox, swollen eyes, vomiting--the usual trials of childhood--can be alarmingly beautiful, thrillingly sensual moments in Mann's portrait album. Her ambivalence about motherhood--her delight and despair--pushes Mann to delve deeper into the steaming mess of family life than most of us are willing to go. What she comes up with is astonishing." --Vince Aletti,
The Village Voice "Immediate Family, which was published in 1990, must be counted as one of the great photograph books of our time. It is a singularly powerful evocation of childhood from within and without ..." --Luc Sante,
The New Republic Afterword by Reynolds Price. Hardcover, 11 x 9.5 in./88 pgs