Sally Mann’s work is very controversial, not just her series Immediate Family but also her other works like What Remains and Deep South. Many people question the ethics of taking pictures of naked children and calling it Art. ‘The word pornography is derived from a Greek term meaning ‘the writings of harlots or prostitutes.’ Closely related, and in legal terms virtually identical, is obscenity, which is ‘behavior or material that is immoral and designed to produce lust. Under the United States law child pornography is defined as “the visual depiction of minor children under the age of 18 engaging in sex acts such as sexual intercourse, masturbation or oral sex. The definition also covers photographs or depictions of children’s genitalia.” (Free Advice: Online). In my opinion Mann’s work is moving at the very edge of this definition. One can clearly see by looking at any of her pictures in the series that Mann did not take them to expose her children in a sexually perverse way but to capture Art using the body, posture, expression and location.
To understand why some of the pictures in Mann’s series feature her children posing nude, and why she has allowed the public to view the pictures, we must look at her childhood and frame of mind. We are told by her Mother, Elizabeth Munger, in the DVD, ‘What remains: the life and works of Sally Mann’ [2] that she refused to wear cloths for the first two years of her life. In the DVD Mann also states that she grew up within a nonconformist family that did not go to church or were religious in any way and were not members of a country club. In addition to this she was the youngest of three children.
from the above facts that she grew up in a very liberal, non conformist family that had their own definitions of what is acceptable and what is not. Sally Mann’s childhood was spent in an environment that was without many of the boundaries of her contemporary society. Besides this, a lot of people assume that their parents in contras to their other children often spoil last-born children. Thus Mann may have not been disciplined as much as her siblings. These two factors may have made her have an open mind when taken pictures of her children modeling in the nude.
Mann seems to have been influenced by her father who enjoyed taking pictures and who was quite willing to shoot images of his daughter in the nude. She uses an old 8×10 view camera given to her by her father to take all of her pictures.
I conclude it to be undeniable that Mann’s pictures of her nude children produces lust in pedophiles. For them such images become obscene. This could potentially put the lives of many vulnerable children at a serious, longterm risk. Since Sally Mann’s pictures under consideration can be read as being pornographic – although being it only by a smal, but seemingly growing minority of pedophiles – she should not have released them to the public. It can even be argued that by her doing so, she becomes legally involved in the activities of pedophiles. The only thing that possibly stops her from being persecuted is the difficulty to obtain evidence of her connections with the pedophiles. At any rate, the more one thinks about these sorrry matters, the less one can support Sally Mann’s potential contribution to them. However one can still appreacite the artistic nature of her pictures when viewed in the right context and space.
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