 How's it? How's it? And today we're looking at a photographer who's controversial and intimate portraits of her own children rocketed her to fame. Today recognized as one of the leading artistic photographers in the United States, Sally Mann's photography is absolutely gorgeous and beautiful, and I can't wait to share it with you today. Thank you for joining me here today on the photographic eye. Sally Mann's philosophy and approach to photography is to try and make art from from the everyday ordinary. Throughout her career, Sally Mann has stayed close to her home in her native Virginia to create her photographs. And these are these are photographs that I feel almost seem to drip with affection for their subject, whether that's their children or the landscape around her. Sally's early beginnings as an artist started when she was in university. She was working as a photographer doing sort of grip and grin shots and group photographs of sports teams. When you look at some of her early personal work, it's easy to see the influences that she's getting from, you know, photographers like Edward Weston in her compositions, and there's a strong similarity between the two of them. Despite being well known today as a photographer who created loving portraits of her children, initially she thought that there were only sort of worthy of snapshots to put it into her own words. And then sort of one day her daughter, Jesse, came to her with a giant nap bite on her face and she decided to look so striking that that she wanted to photograph it. And it was here when she was looking at the resulting picture that it occurred to her that right under her nose was this art, was the scope of art. And she didn't need to go off into the world to find art and that it was all around her. And this is when Sally, in her own words, has started to see things sort of around her life sort of differently and with the eyes of an artist. She'd already published a book of portraits called At 12 Portraits of Young Woman and this was her first foray into the genre that she would become known for. Of course, at the time she was photographing other people's children and one of the best known and striking images from this book is an image called candy cigarette. And I feel that that image most strongly echoes the later work that Sally would go on to produce with her own children. And in this book, At 12, The Portraits of Young Ladies, you can see that she's experimenting with various ideas about sort of composition and style. And some of this work sort of draws considerably from a photographer called Mary Ellen Mark, who was a well-known sort of documentary photographer. And it feels quite gritty. It's important to remember that photographers don't really emerge fully formed, as it were, from the womb. But, you know, they grow and they develop over time and drawing inspiration from other people is certainly not a sin. And with these portraits of Sally, you know, these are striking portraits of children of the cusp of adulthood. And they attracted a small amount of controversy, but nothing like she was going to get with her third book, which is called A Media of Family. Having grown up somewhat of a feral child through her own admission and not awfully keen on wearing clothes when she was younger, it seemed natural that Sally would gravitate towards photographing her own children in this state. And of course, while there's a lot of controversy around sort of the new child figures in this book, it should be noted there are so few of them that, you know, they constitute only like a tenth of the images in the actual photograph. So it was really a bit more of a storm in a tea cup. And one of the things that I really enjoy about this period of Sally's work is that it does capture this essence and this freedom of a rural childhood and almost like a kind of a nine-year or so never-never land sort of quality to them. And of course, you get this because first of all, Sally is a fantastic artist who can see art in the everyday. And the other is that working with a large format camera is a very slow and very deliberate process. And of course, it gives the artist time to reflect and create the precise photograph and work that they're looking to achieve. And I think it's a measure of Sally's expertise that she can blend this slow process with the free-spirited nature of childhood. Sally somewhat struggles with this concept of being an artist and she feels an enormous amount of pressure to continuously evolve and grow and improve her work. And it's this idea that each image needs to be better than the last one, that an artist can't back off as it were. That forces her to push her envelope harder and harder and harder because she wants to evolve and improve. And if you look at her evolution as a photographer, you can strikingly see this in action. You know, she started off with photographing her children and over time they become smaller and smaller and smaller in the frame to what you're left with is almost a landscape photograph. And it was here that sort of two things came to pass. In 2001 the children were obviously getting older and Sally was also starting to get tired of photographing her children and wanted to do actual landscape photography. So she said that it felt like a useful segue to start becoming a landscape photographer and experimenting also with wet processes like amber types and tin types and collodion with her antique large format cameras which I feel lends her photographs in a serial quality to them that sort of echoes almost back to the very beginnings of photography and certainly makes me think of the alchemy of the whole process as taking something as elusive as light and fixing it onto a plate through an almost mystical and magical process. It's not almost a counterpoint to her earlier work with the children that her later work has focused on what happens after we're no longer here. You know, what mark do we leave upon the world? And she's done a series of photographs exploring this idea. I mentioned earlier that there was a series of photographs of her doing sort of dead bodies as they returned to their natural state in the land but she's also photographed the Civil War battlefields that dot the landscape of her home around Virginia. These early images remind me somewhat of Roger Fenton and Matthew Brady who were both photographers in the later part of the 1800s who covered the Crimean War and the Civil War respectively. Perhaps it's because of the similar processes used or because Sally's managed to capture the essence of these places long after these momentous occurred that I can sort of feel like she's sort of stepped back in time into the shoes of Matthew Brady walking these Civil War battlefields and saying, look, these landscapes have seen death and destruction but have returned to more sort of natural state but they still hold the essence of these great events. She's also created a series of portraits of a Larry who since the mid-1990s has had muscular dystrophy and she's been documenting his unfortunate progress of course through this illness. Especially more so given that Sally said when they met as late teens, Larry was a big strong hulking man and to see this wasting away has been a source of obviously distress but being able to document it in a way that makes it feel like it's art and again drawing on this idea that art is all around us has made these images extremely powerful. Sally is so much more than just a photographer who's photographed her children for a controversial book. Her photography both inspires us and it challenges us to look a bit more closely at the mysteries of the everyday world that surrounds us and again this comes back to this alchemy of photography and I hope it's inspired you to look in your own environment and see what can be considered art. I hope you enjoyed that look at the photography of Sally Mann and thanks once again for spending time with me here at the Photographic Eye. If you'd like to be notified when there are more videos like this one please do hit the subscribe button and the notification bell it would be so nice to be able to share these videos with you. Thanks ever so much again and I'll see you soon.