A black and white hazy image of water in the foreground and a horizon of trees in the backgroun…

Untitled #45

Artist Sally Mann (American, born 1951)

Date1998

Mediumgelatin silver enlargement print, toned with tea mounted on rag board

DimensionsImage: 40 1/8 × 50 3/8 inches (101.9 × 128 cm)
Framed: 42 1/2 × 52 3/4 × 3/8 inches (108 × 134 × 1 cm)

Portfolio/Series"Deep South" series no. 45, NY-SM-738

Credit LineMuseum purchase.

Object number2010.26

On View

Not on view

Copyright© Sally Mann. The images and text contained on this page are owned by Telfair Museums or used by the Museum with permission from the owners. Unauthorized reproduction, transmission or display of these materials is prohibited with the exception of items deemed “fair use” as defined by U.S. and international copyright laws.Label TextSally Mann, a Virginia-born and raised photographer, is connected deeply to the Southern landscape she has been photographing since the 1970s. She often works with 19th century printing techniques to conjure her eerily haunting images of the landscape. Using a 100-year-old Bellows camera and a wet-plate collodion technique, she revels in the imperfections caused by the ancient method, embracing scratches and dust on the glass as serendipitous marks. Combined with the abstracted light, this process makes her photographs appear more like a murky memory than a clear-cut landscape. That light and sense of loss is made apparent in Untitled #45 from her Deep South series. Barely visible, the landscape appears more like an abstracted string of lights floating in the dark than a picture of a particular place and time. But Mann embraces the ambiguity produced from the lack of clarity. The technique and subject matter reinforce the power of the Southern landscape to avoid easy categorization.

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