A Few More Random Notes about Sally Mann

There are a handful of other observations I want to make, which didn't fit into any sort of "review" framework.

The first is something you're unlikely to notice in other showings of her recent exhibition, but in the Washington DC show the audience was almost exclusively white with a few asians, and the guards standing around directing people and keeping people from touching the pictures were 100% black. Not mostly black, every single one was black. In fact, all of the security personnel in the National Art Gallery are black, as far as I observed.

Washington DC is a town in the South of the USA, at least in a sense. It is largely African-American. There is a sort of existing population, that is largely black, and a more transient and affluent population of politicos and bureaucrats (and, of course, masses of tourists) who are almost exclusively white. These lines are not absolutely strict, of course, but the population demographics are extremely distinct.

It was telling to have right in our face the reality of the USA so lovingly depicted in the photos. I have to wonder what percentage of the attendees noticed this.

The second random note is this. These two photos both appear in the show:

The first one is the riverbank where Emmett Till's body washed up. The second is a picture of Emmett Mann and his family digging and playing in the mud along a different river.

This is a coincidence. These pictures were made 15-20 years apart, the provenance of each picture is well known, and (given that provenance) I don't see any real way that one could have been deliberately built to look like the other. Two Emmetts, two rivers, two ditches. Funny, that. I dare say Mann has noticed this too. I wonder what she thinks about it.

The third note is that the missing picture of Emmett Mann at the end of the show does appear in the show catalog. Which, in a way, is nice because we get to see it. I don't know if they simply ran out of space, or if Mann made a late change to what she was willing to hang, or a bit of both, or something else entirely. But there it is.

The show catalog, by the way, as I have mentioned(?), is excellent and inexpensive. The essays are by and large crashingly boring, navigating that worst possible course between academic and accessible. I guess someone's got to have a whack at Explaining Sally Mann in one of these things. Of the multiple essays I have been bored into stopping on all but one of them. They're not bad as such, they're just far too long, they're basically kind of dull, and many of them are unconnected to the pictures in hand. We get a lot of stuff on Sally Mann, we get a lot of stuff on Wet Plate, but not too much on what the hell Mann is on about here.

It's worth it just for the pictures, though.