RD5-Emmett,Jessie &Virginia

Emmett,Jessie&Virginia(Further to Q2 of Listed questions)

I had briefly looked into Emmett, Jessie and Virginia’s profiles as well as the story of the photo. And a few more questions arise to me:

1,What influence may this experience in participating in Sally Mann’s photo have on three youngsters?  

2,Why  did Sally Mann set up that kind of look?

Of course this image will also involve the gender issue if talking about photo staging. Emmett being at the middle of the photo with two girls next, he is also the only one who seems to be wearing underpants. Also he wears lucky chains as accessary, this could all be included in gender issue. But because of my future research that involves nudity of three children which may also be analyzing gender issue, I will leave this question to later.

As we may have all learnt form Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, Sally Mann had introduced her children to her world of art from a very young age. Because of the attrations to Sally Mann’s controversial photos, Emmett, Jessie and Virgina had been under spotlight at very young age since Sally Mann’s photographer went well-known. They all have become used to the large amount of attentions from a room of strangers. The NewYork time had described how the children acted at the gallery.

“Motoring among the spectators like honorees at a testimonial dinner, Mann’s three children — Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10, and Virginia, 7 — looked completely at ease with the crowd’s prying adoration. While her mother and father conversed with friends and admirers, Jessie orbited the four rooms in her red dress, fielding questions from strangers eager to know more about her parents. Beneath a portrait of himself in the water, Emmett shrugged off the stares and expressed a typical teen-age frame of mind. “These shoes cost $70,” he boasted about his opening night footwear. All three seemed unconcerned by the fact that on the surrounding white walls they could be examined, up close, totally nude.”

(Sourced from : http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/magazine/the-disturbing-photography-of-sally-mann.html, Accessed on 26th Oct 10)

The success of Sally Mann’s “ordinary family photos” had somehow changed the life of the children. Sally Mann, as the photographer and also the mother of three, had definitely influenced their childhood. Posing for the cameras, the children are experiencing a childhood that is different to any other families. Sally Mann had chose to get them involve in her art by sacrificing the children’s ordinary childhood.

They are no longer be able to go back to normal life that normal kids have. Suddenly they are known to tens of thousands of people around the world. All these fame gained through an unusual way by the later famous photographer of the American – their mother. 

Jessie had once mentioned what the fames bring to them at an interview. She herself was quite into art and was used to the spotlight. She later become actively involved in art herself. Yet Emmett and Virginia had totally different reactions. The former was lost and did not know where he was. While the latter one just wanted to be back to normal life. Virginia did walk away and went on to do law school.

“Each of us is dealing with that pressure in a very different way. Emmett is completely daunted by it. He doesn’t know what he wants, so he backs away from the whole thing: he’s sometimes afraid to have any goals or any aspirations, doesn’t want to get too involved or too intense. Mom is a very driven person, and really has little understanding of people who aren’t that driven. Emmett has to sort it out on his own. He and I are very close. Kind of like Franny and Zooey, we keep each other together. We help each other out. Nobody can understand what I’m going through like he can.

Ginna, on the other hand, was a lot younger than Emmett and me when those pictures were taken, so I think the experience for her was completely different. Her attitude right now is: ‘I want to have a normal life; I want to forget about this; I don’t want to have to use it to my advantage; I don’t want to either be living up to something or living down to something; I’m just going to be living.’ She’s trying to go the middle road more than I’ve ever seen, trying to be ‘normal.’ And coming out of our family, that takes a lot of effort. . . . Ginna wants to be like everybody else, and these pictures have made that difficult. One of the things that Mom did best was always allow us to sort of go for it, to find out who we were, no matter what the cost. When I wanted to shave my head, she was there with the clippers. ‘Do it. Have fun. Explore yourself. I’m not not going to tell you who you are.’ For me, that was a really great freedom, but I don’t think Ginna responded to the whole situation like that.”
(Source : http://members.cox.net/logophore/issues/cult/bank_cult_mann.html, accessed on 26th Oct 10)

On the other hand, taking part in Sally Mann’s photographer did give them something else. In one of the other interviews with Art 21, both Emmett and Jessie spoke of the positive change they have from Sally Mann. The unique experience had provide approach to art by participating in the artwork themselves. Jessie, who had also become actively in art after growing up, may had proved Sally Mann’s efforts. The children grew up in the world of Sally Mann who had enjoyed a totally unusual form of expressing her art through naked children, death etc. Is it good or bad for the children?  

“ART:21:   Has taking part in your mother’s photography changed your life in any way?

Emmett:   I feel like being in those pictures definitely has changed me as a person. Definitely.

Jessie:   Because you have to get a sense of yourself, not only how you exist and your immediate surroundings, and how you exist in your family which is enough of a struggle for most of society, but we also have to think about how we figure in all of America and all of the art scene because so many people have seen us that you…we have a persona that’s beyond us, that we don’t have control…

Emmett:   I mean anyone who’s as driven as Sally Mann is, is going to be an intense mother and she’s like…she’s an incredible mom.“

(Sourced from : http://talentdevelop.com/motherhood2.html, accessed on 26th Oct 10)

This does bring up another question: are the children involved in the art voluntarily or simply forced to be in the scene? A critical article “Nole Me Tangere” by Noelle Oxehandle also mentioned about similar question. She had expressed her worries about the young children whose posture  in front of the camera made others uncomfortable. She remembered how vulnable her child used to be and what unusual way of putting children in the position of those postures. Noelle even brought up the word of torture and execution in the article questioning the photos as dangerous to the children.

Which is really the more dangerous vision of children: the one that presents them to us, scrubbed
and cute among flowers, as decor, accessory? Or the one that acknowledges the edges we walk on? As
Jung said: it’s what remains unconscious that returns as fate.

 (sourced from: http://www.nerve.com/content/nole-me-tangere-the-family-photographs-of-sally-mann, accessed on 28th Oct 10) 

 While question remained is whether or not the children were simply driven by her own desire for art. Of course many people would concentrate on the discussion of the role that Sally Mann plays as a mother. This may also be important and included in my future research. But the fact that one can’t deny is they are somehow influenced by their mother. It is understood that she believed her children all volunteered to be involved in the process of making art. But here I would prefer to look at particularly the impact Sally Mann has on the children as a role of photographer. Because photographing is what she seemed to be spending more time on rather than anything else in her early life as a mother.

“And any parent knows that you can’t force a child to make art; they have to cooperate, they have to want to be part of the process. When we made these pictures, the kids knew exactly what to do to make an image work: how to look, how to project degrees of intensity or defiance or plaintive, woebegone, Dorthea-Lange dejection. I didn’t pry these pictures from them — they gave them to me. Remember that and the images take on a wholly different meaning — no deep psychological manipulations or machinations, just the straight-forward, everyday telling of a story.”[Sourced from : http://www.cvm.qc.ca/mbenoit/psocial/main.html, Accessed on 02 Nov 10] 

Sally Mann would defend herself from the controversies that the photos were collaboration with her children. But I think when she agreed to let these photos go public, she had somehow gave up her role as mother or the motherhood was hiden behind the photos which we don’t get to see. What we see is simply the photos and hence hard to judge things without knowing the truth of their family life. 

Others may argue the role Sally Mann played as a mother. Because of photos she took for the children, there are always controversies about whether or not she is a good mother. That could be necessary for further research. Yet good or bad for the children, they all started with her desire for producing something impressive. The photos still reflects a mother’s loving regard. As Jessie Mann spoke once that

” This was her way of showing her love for them, through the capturing of their lives on film. She has a hard time letting us know how much she loves us. But I’ve also realized that each one of those photographs was her way of capturing, if not in a hug or a kiss or a comment, how much she cared about us” , sourced from: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/11/theory-sally-manns-immediate-family.html, accessed on 04th Nov 10

Every coin has two sides, how much the children were influenced is something complicated if we do not know the story behind the scene. We only see the children from the photos yet we do not know how their live their lives. So I will probably end this topic for now, but instead will start on the setting up of her photos.