Sally Mann
Gagosian Gallery
February 9, 2008
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-format photographs by Sally Mann. Executed between 2000 and 2004, these works consist of images of the faces of her three children Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia.
These powerful images of Mann's children are simultaneously painterly and photographic. They are made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate.
The resulting light sensitive plate, loaded into a plate holder and attached to the camera, must be exposed while still wet, a period of approximately six minutes.
The photographers who originally used this method, which was introduced in 1851, worked to perfect the process and avoid irregularities.
Sally Mann, however, embraces these aberrations; she celebrates the peculiar flares, stains and dust trails unique to the collodion process. She describes them as serendipitous, as "perfect flaws" which help create the mystical and poetic quality of the photographs. Perhaps because of the lengthy exposures (as long as 6 minutes and never less than 3), the images possess a transcendent timelessness.
It may be this sense of suspended time, as much as genetics, that renders the faces of Mann's children eerily interchangeable.
Enigmatic, they seem to be awaiting the viewer's glance to wake from their shadowed stillness and take their next breath.
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