Immeadiate Family

I can remember the first time I picked up Sally Mann’s book of photographs entitled "Immediate Family." I was in college, and, I remember being utterly fascinated by the photographs which chronicle her children’s lives from childhood to puberty. The images capture her three children in various stages of play: eating Popsicle sticks, dressing up dolls, getting a bloody nose, running around the yard of their West Virginia home, and, in them one can see the fearlessness of youth. These could be any other snapshots of an American childhood if it weren’t for the stark beauty of the shots which practically gleam on the page. Mann shoots her children in stark black and whites and the pictures have a Victorian Gothic quality. This is a slightly eerie world where the darkness of adulthood lurks in the background reminding us that childhood can be spoiled at any moment. Mann’s children are too real to be ghosts - they bleed, they cry, they laugh – but the photographs of their youth still haunt nevertheless.