The photographs in Sally Mann’s haunting new series “Proud Flesh” seem to hover in the dusk between being and not being.
These black-and-white images depict a nude male in elliptical compositions that focus on parts of him — his back, an upraised arm, a leg on a chair — almost to the point of abstraction. Yet, it is clear that the subject is a wraithlike, middle-aged man.
The sense of fragility his physique conveys is underscored by the bubbles, scratches and abscesses that gnaw at the surface of the prints. These marks are chance imperfections, byproducts of the wet-plate collodion process, which Mann welcomes as a potter would the markings created in a raku kiln.
The process, popular in the 19th century, also imparts an antique character and, here, an unworldly atmosphere of stark, almost shocking contrasts of bright light and tenebrous dark. The dark hand resting on his shoulder in “Ponder Heart” doesn’t seem to belong to the same body as his white back.
One does need not know that the man is her husband, Larry, or that he suffers from muscular dystrophy, a wasting disease that attacks the muscle girdle, to perceive these photographs as intimations of mortality and loss.
But then, those themes have always been in Mann’s work, a sampling of which can be found in the back gallery. She addressed them overtly in her 2003 book “What Remains,” which encompasses subjects such as the decomposing body of her pet greyhound, the decaying corpses at a federal Forensic Anthropology Facility known as the body farm, and Antietam, the site of one of the bloodiest Civil War battles, as well as her elegiac Southern landscapes. But they are also present in her career-making portraits of her young children, which were freighted, as she said in a recent interview, “with the impossibility of freezing life; the inevitable march of time.”
Could “What Remains” have been subconscious references to her husband’s disease, which had already been diagnosed? Mann started “Proud Flesh” six years ago intending to explore the genre of the male nude as a formal project and feminist statement.
She quickly realized, however, that it was about the man she loved, and his illness.
“Photography forces you to look at things you don’t see in everyday life,” said Mann. “You look so much more carefully through the viewfinder. The disease progresses slowly, and there were things I hadn’t noticed till then. His right leg and left arm are very thin, concentration-camp thin.”
For “Speak, Memory,” the most disturbing photograph in the show, she shot her husband lying on a bed, standing above him at his feet. His skeletal rib cage is prominent. Like most of the images, his face is hidden. He looks almost like a carcass.
Mann said the photo suggests to her Civil War hospitals and prison camps. Its striking composition recalls “Dead Christ,” a painting by Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna, a picture of which just happens to be posted on her studio wall.
If “Speak, Memory” is direct in its allusion to death, the overarching feelings communicated in “Proud Flesh” are Larry Mann’s stoic dignity and Sally Mann’s loving, aching regard.
Catherine Fox is chief visual art critic for www.ArtsCriticATL.com.
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Gallery review
“Proud Flesh and Other Works”
Through Oct. 29. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Jackson Fine Art. 3115 E. Shadowlawn Ave. 404-233-3739. www.jacksonfineart.com
Bottom line: Sally Mann digs deeper and soars higher in her new series, “Proud Flesh.”
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