Robert Kenney Wet-Plate Collodion – Sally Mann’s Angels
Working closely with the wet-plate photographer Robert Kenney, BCreative develops content for his company blog that engages the history, ideas and emotions sparking his work.
“I pray for the angel of uncertainty to visit my plates” – Sally Mann
As the poet Rilke wrote, “every angel is terrifying”. So in this spirit, Sally Mann has haunted me in recent years. And inspired me to a deeper faith in the power of photography to reveal the trouble in the truth of ourselves. Mann packs a lot of punch into her pictures. And she never flinches from presenting provocative, raw and viscerally emotional imagery. And she does all this (or much of it) using a camera made of wood milled in 1866 and kitted out with antique lenses that are as chipped and worn as old bones. What’s not to love?
Mann first stirred public attention – and controversy – with her series Immediate Family. The photographs depict her 3 children Emmett, Jessie and Virginia graced by innocence though their mother may have something more than an innocent eye in taking these pictures. In some photographs, the children are naked yet possessed of a clear certainty that they are part of this artistic transaction. Inevitably some myopic ranters – seeing only what they did not want others to see – called out the work as a sexual offense.
Mann played the mother card and got away with it. Rightfully so, the images are honest and intimate but not intrusive; despite the camera, the children live within the protected comfort of an Edenic expanse. In a word, childhood. But the images blew up in a society where childhood now needs to be so guarded off from potential invaders that there is no hood for a child to exist in as themselves anymore. 25 years on from Immediate Family, children are shut away in their rooms touching computer screens. Mann saw their freedom – not their sexuality – and documented it with maternal attention. Still, that ridiculous controversy made her career. Every artist dreams of having their own Jerry Falwell.
Mann started using the wet-plate collodion process about a decade after this storm. Her focus had shifted to the landscapes of the old Confederate south. Places once blood-soaked but now mostly barren. Hallowed ground. The fact that the collodion process was used by Mathew Brady, among many other civil war photographers, to depict stoic soldierly pride and the ruins of battle was well-known to Mann. As well, the emulsion collodion was made from cotton, the most important crop to the slave-based economy of the old South.
What I like about Mann is that she pays strict attention to every detail in her photographs yet still allows her “angels of uncertainty” to mark her vision. Mann’s landscape photographs are ethereal and the collodion process adds to this effect. Scarred by the chemical process, the spare images are bled through with broken light and feel sacred.
What unnerves me in a Sally Mann photograph is the raw honesty of her vision that she conveys through her control of this fragile medium. Or better yet uncontrollably controls. As she says, let there be angels. Perhaps the most evocative of all her work is the series of self-portraits of her face seen close up that Mann did for the series The Flesh and The Spirit. They’re brutal. But also beguiling. In the exhibition, she presents the images grid-like one beside the next, so that you have a compelling autobiography of a face. Or maybe what she is so frontally presenting is a depiction of what lies beneath the surface – the distorted, flawed and decaying self that we all are. But even when wounded, she remains beautiful. The grace of her candour is just one of her talents.
Always pay your respects to those who went before you. So I will allow Mann the final word –
“There’s an ineffable quality, a refulgence, to collodion that the ordinary silver negative cannot capture. Maybe it’s the thickness of the glass that adds gravity to the image. When you pour the plate, it turns cold in your hand and a frisson goes through you. It becomes a ritual act of reverence for the picture you are about to make.”
