Eyeless
We’ve been looking at iconic female photographers (Arbus, Sherman) in class and it seems time to turn to Sally Mann. Yet I feel tired of the standard questions about her family photographs. That’s their business. Browsing, however, I came across this self-portrait that astonished me. I am familiar with Mann’s wet collodion work, images she prints on large glass plates using the same early photographic techniques as Julia Margaret Cameron. But here was a photograph both like and unlike Cameron’s work: characteristically blurry and close-up, but also more obviously eerie and stark than Cameron’s portraits, despite the deep black backgrounds. The face is carved by light and looks up as if to the heavens. The eyes, though, are blank: white space where the self should be. That absence seems critical: where is the photographer’s eye here? Where is her private self? She displays her face as mask, her hand on the glass. The self-portrait would seem to be an egoist’s genre, but Mann avoids giving much away besides form and shadow. It is image as revelation, a new way to see and be seen.
In: contemporary, photography, portraiture · Tagged with: Julia Margaret Cameron, Sally Mann