ANALYSIS: SALLY MANN

This work was done by photographer Sally Mann. Mann, is an american photographer who is best known for her black and white photographs of young children and landscapes which suggest decay and death.
This piece of work was part of an exhibition named 'Immediate Family' in which she takes photographs of her three children Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10, and Virginia, 7. Mann began to capture all her children's stages of growing up and what happens during this important time in their childhood, from cuts and bruises to nose bleeds. Instead of simply taking a photograph, she managed to turn these innocent childhood events into works of art. However many of her photographs of her children are very controversial and not approved by all. 

I choose to look at Sally Mann's work because I find something so innocent and pure about it however it still has this dark twist to it. I think this may be because of the great usage of black and white photography and also she is capturing the "reality" of childhood. It is not all about smiles and sweets.

I read an article done by The New York Times where it talks about her 'Immediate Family' exhibition and this helped me to have a better understanding about the work she does. 

As mentioned I do think that the photographs do become a lot more powerful and striking because of them being in black and white. The dark shadows really help to create a quite sinister mood. 

My first reaction to her work was that it was quite disturbing to look at, however once I looked deeper and saw the meaning behind it and why she did it I found the work very inspiring so I decided to do my own interpretations.

sally Mann inspired:

In my attempt to create work like Sally Mann's I took a few pictures with a digital SLR and then edited them on Photoshop  The first is a simple picture of my niece which I turned into black and white by adjusting the levels, brightness and contrast.

The last three I gave my brother a black eye (i painted it with some makeup to look like such) and then tried to recreate on of sally's photos. I took inspiration from this photo. I again done some simple editing on Photoshop giving two of them a 'sepia' look and then the other one in black and white. I think that I would maybe like to explore these even further and try to take some photographs in different location such as woods and things like that and see what effect I can get.