Sally Mann Documentary

In class, we watched a documentary about American photographer Sally Mann. Sally is an artist, mom, and wife that was demonstrated through the documentary that showed different sides of her, but overall showed the love and passion she had in being all three. In this documentary it showed the process she goes through for taking photographs. She uses an 8 x 10 view camera that portrays black and white photographs in beautiful details. In my opinion, using this type of camera rather than a digital camera is pretty cool. It was interesting watching this documentary because it demonstrated the organization and skillful planning she does for her series projects. One of her main series projects was about her family primarily her children. In these photographs, she showed the reality of how children are such as getting a bee sting, swimming in a lake, sibling bonding, and being randomly naked, etc.  With that being said, there was a lot of controversy with her family series that debated whether some of the pictures of her children were considered child pornography. However, she does state that people interpreted her family series project in another way rather than it was supposed to be. Honestly, in my opinion, it depends on the perspective of the viewer and how they portray it. Another series she worked on was very unique that displayed dead bodies. She explained that she began to be fascinated with life and death when a person shot himself near her house which inspired her series of dead bodies. It was interesting to see her thoughts and process for this unique series because it showed a sense of creepy but yet logical reasoning behind why she did this unique series. In my opinion, I think it’s pretty cool that she explored this concept of life and death from a unique perspective. I do realize that for many people it is considered creepy, however,  I actually liked her dead body series. Overall, I was fascinated with Sally Mann and her work because of her uniqueness. She portrayed herself through her work and demonstrated how passionate she is with everything she does.