An update on that Alice Munro essay: it is making its way to a first reader. In the meantime, here’s this week’s essay. If you like this, please consider supporting my work.
Sally Mann is in trouble again. In November, Texas police seized some of her photographs, calling them pornographic. Mann is especially famous for images of her children in the nude, and some of these were part of an exhibit titled “Diaries of Home,” a collection of works by various artists, including Mann and Nan Goldin. A Virginia-based photographer, Mann has long created and exhibited mostly black and white works that document her family—her husband Larry and their three children from the time they were very young (her eldest, Emmett took his own life in 2016, at the age of 36, and the two remaining children are in their 40s). They lived on an idyllic farm, and the photos are, well, pretty. This is a family where nudity was a natural way of being, and the children were photographed with and without clothing for a long while.
In 1990, Mann exhibited her collection Immediate Family, her third but the first to include the polarising images that have continued to attract controversy—and politicians who want to demonstrate conservative family values to their voters. The current exhibit draws from these photographs. The project was published as a monograph in 1992, and instantly declared pornographic and exploitative in the usual quarters. I first encountered her work in that book, and I recall being curious about the photographs that had generated so much ire. What made them interesting, I wondered, apart from the fact that her children were occasionally naked in them (a fact that struck me as quite banal)? Mann had insisted that she was “just a mother photographing her children as they were growing up.”
She was right. Immediate Family was and is dull, wrapped in a bland aesthetic that does not challenge the viewer in any way. Contrary to what angry critics claim, the nakedness of the children is neither exploitative nor lurid. County Judge Tim O’Hare decried the images as evidence of the “sexual exploitation of [minors],” seemingly unaware that the photographs were taken four decades ago—or, more likely, he is fully aware, and is using the occasion to polish his political image. (In the U.S alone, the child beauty pageant industry, worth over $5 billion, pressures children as young as 6 to tantalise audiences while dressed as sex workers, and yet somehow that is both tolerated and encouraged, while a mother’s photographs of her children are treated as dangerous material.) The American Civil Liberties (ACLU) has joined with the The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) to demand an end to the investigation and the return of the photos. In a statement, the groups said that “there is no question they are intended to provoke thought and challenge viewers to engage with ideas, not to satisfy their sexual desires.”
They’re right, of course, and, if pressed, I would stand outside the courtroom in protest, demanding the return of the images and that the exhibit should continue to display them.
But I would grumble, quietly and under my breath, about my irritation at having to stand up for Mann. Her photographs are cloyingly sentimental, reflecting a steadfastly bourgeois view of a family unit. That many are in black and white and soft focus only renders them nostalgic and slightly other-worldly. The occasional public controversies around the images, which Mann has addressed at length, distract from how mundane the work really is. For forty years, they have escaped any real critique from the art world because of the controversy surrounding them. But the fact that conservatives dislike a work of art does not automatically render it brave or cutting edge or, pardon me for repeating myself, interesting. With a second Donald Trump presidency, we are likely to see even more censorship of the arts, in all forms, and it is necessary to protest such, every single time. But the arts in the United States, and perhaps all over the globe, already suffer from blandness and a lower bar to determine what constitutes truly brave and fearless art. Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” has been banned in Florida, but that does not mean the work is anything but a nonsensical stringing together of words and phrases, without even the shadow of anything we might call poetry. (I’m still trying to understand what “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” actually means, never mind the rest).1Many thanks to S.R for reminding me of this.
Mann’s work, unlike Gorman’s, is at least technically proficient but it also bears the mark of faux insurgency, nowadays easily acquired like a gold star in kindergarten. But what makes art, of any kind, truly radical and dangerous? What makes it disturbing? And does that fact alone make it worthy of note?
I am reminded of the time, aeons ago, when one of my former workplaces decided that its corridors needed some art. Someone, somewhere in the appropriate department (was there an “Office of Beautification” somewhere?) found the money to acquire excellent and beautifully framed prints of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flowers—vulval leaves and petals swooning in desire, inching towards the void beyond the frames. Were they flowers, were they anything else? I was delighted, but others were not. One day, as I was discussing them with my friend V, his officemate came storming in, angry, red-faced, and demanding to know, “Who is responsible for those obscene images?”
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Image: Michelle Hood, Wiki
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