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Essay Sally Mann

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You are required to discuss a work by a 20th or 21st century artist, photographer, designer, architect, film-maker, philosopher or writer and show how this work reflects, contradicts or extends theories of and attitudes to visual culture current at the time of its making.

I have chosen Sally Mann as my artist as she is an extraordinary photographer that went against the grain to create something completely different. She has a strange way of making outstanding, personal imagery. She inspires my own work because of her ability to see things others would not.
Sally Mann photographs the things that she is closest to. “The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best, unless you photograph what you love, you’re …show more content…

Sally Mann explored the concept of childhood and "growing" up through a maternal eye.

Popsicle Drips, 1985. The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude, 1987.
The image entitled "Popsicle Drips” shows a young, male torso, with liquid dripping down his lower abdomen. His right hip is tilted to the side, and his arms out of view. When you initially look at the image, it is quite disturbing because of the liquid substance dripping down the boy’s abdomen. Without the explanatory title, the substance could be anything. On first inspection it appeared to me to be dirt, which in my opinion would make more sense. Why would Popsicle drips be on the boy’s naked body in the first place?
This naked picture is the only photograph in the entire body of work that shows full frontal male nudity. The viewer may feel uncomfortable looking at the image as it is highly provocative in its subject's pose, and the added Popsicle drips add an element of physicality. Because the artist is a woman and the subject is a male, for some people this caused an issue as it became more sexual. Emmet, the only male of the three children, is seen much less provocatively in the series than the girls are. The photograph ‘Sunday Funnies’, 1991, shows Jessie and Virginia lying naked in a bed really the comics in a newspaper, but Emmett appears with shorts. While the girls are busy acting out a role Mann has conducted, he stares at the camera, almost offended in the way he is

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