Jessie at Five
Mann’s frank images of her children, in which they often appeared undressed and sometimes aped adults by posing with candy cigarettes or dressing up, courted minor controversy during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Seen in retrospect, however, her works can be seen more as collaborations with her subjects to capture something of their untamed interior life and imagination—reminiscent of both Julia Margaret Cameron’s psychologizing portraiture and Lewis Carroll’s tableaux vivant of Victorian youth in costume. Although worry over the corrosive effects of culture on the sanctity of childhood innocence is at least as old as Romanticism, Mann’s photographs of her children are remarkable for the artist’s assured handling of a potentially explosive subject with equanimity and grace.
Artwork Details
- Title: Jessie at Five
- Artist: Sally Mann (American, born 1951)
- Date: 1987
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: 20.2 x 25.3 cm. (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, Ronald A. Kurtz Gift, 1989
- Object Number: 1989.1007
- Rights and Reproduction: © Sally Mann
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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Multiple artists/makers
1970s
Sally Mann
1991
Sally Mann
1991
Sally Mann
1990
Sally Mann
1991
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