Jessie Bites, 1985

Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, Sally Mann created one of her most well-known series, Immediate Family, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. An intimate portrayal of the bucolic upbringing of her three children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, on their woodland home in rural Virginia, the series was born in the literal sense when Mann decided to photograph the birth of her third child, Virginia. Although the image itself was a ‘dud’, in her memoir Mann marks it as ‘the birth of the family pictures, breathing life into the notion that photographs …could be made everywhere, even in the most seemingly commonplace or fraught moments’ (S. Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, Little, Brown and Company, 2015, p. 111).

Mann describes Damaged Child, 1984 as her ‘first good family picture’, and named the work after Dorthea Lange’s Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma, 1936, for the similarity in both girls’ “look of battered defiance” (ibid., p. 114). Depicting her daughter’s face swollen from insect bites, Mann recounts how, despite the disturbing nature of the image, she found it comforting in that it allowed her “an escape from the manifold terrors of child rearing…stare them straight in the face but at a remove – on paper, in a photograph” (ibid., p. 114).

Mann’s own childhood was spent in the wild land of her family’s home, and the images of her children convey their similar non-traditional upbringing. Jessie Bites, 1985 gives the viewer a glimpse of the fantastic world of make-believe in which her children live. The playfulness of the child’s body drawings and feather boa are counterbalanced by the circular bitemark on the arm next to her, the evidence of past violence interrupting an otherwise innocent image.

The recognition of the complex characters of children is what gives Mann’s images of her own children a universal quality. Mann explains, ‘…children are not just the innocents that we expect them to be. They are also wise, angry, jaded, skeptical, mean, manipulative, brooding and devilishly deceitful…but in a culture so deeply invested in a cult of childhood innocence, we are understandably reluctant to acknowledge these discordant aspects…’ (ibid, p. 156).

Mann’s photographs show her children not only in the midst of childhood mishaps and play, but also captures them in moments of quiet contemplation and respite as seen in both Jessie in the Wind, 1989 and Vinland, 1992. Standing on a dock, Jessie looks at the camera, leaning over the rail, a wind blowing through her hair as others beside her look downwards into the water. In Vinland, a similar pause exists, a young girl, with two perfectly coiled braids, her back to the camera and mind elsewhere, perhaps day dreaming, resting, observing or recharging before the next free-range adventure.

Mann takes us on this journey through motherhood that is both personal, yet universal, intimate to the point of discomfort, but always brutally honest. Damaged Child, 1984 and Jessie Bites, 1985 , Jessie in the Wind, 1989 and Vinland, 1992 are part of Mann’s internationally acclaimed Immediate Family series.