Sally Mann's American Vision of the Land
Year: 2017
Type: other
Abstract: The American photographer Sally Mann is one of the best-known female artists of our time. She is known primarily for her family photographs Immediate Family from 1992, which provoked intense controversies in the American media and art world, around child pornography and motherhood. While these photographs occupy a central place in the artistic discourse about Mann, her series of landscape photographs remain relatively unexamined. This study examines Mann's landscapes and the ways they were framed in the art historical discourse. I argue that the canon of American landscape photography is the subject matter of Mann’s landscapes, and that her work stands in for a wider project: demonstrating that there is no landscape per se, nor ever was. Moreover, by analyzing the discourse surrounding Mann’s landscapes, this study highlights the patriarchal biases and intra-geographical hierarchy of symbolic meanings between the US regions that underlie the canon of American landscape photography.
Author: Ayelet Carmi
Language: English
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2885287186