Davey Savage Junior. © David Gillanders
In the fascinating documentary about her work,What Remains, Sally Mann talks about the idiosyncratic and temperamental nature of wet plate photography and the impact of "technical imperfections" on her work.
"I've taken some pictures in the past that were miraculously transformed by some hand other than my own, and made a better image. And I really welcome those interventions."
The exhibition of her work currently showing at The Photographers' Gallery in London seems to show an increasingly collaborative relationship between Mann and what she calls her "Angel of uncertainty". The earliest work in the show comes from Immediate Family, the work that brought Mann to wide attention, partly because of a fuss about her kids being naked in the photographs, but mostly, and rightly, because of the intensity and power of her images. These images are classic and studied, perhaps a bit contrived but they do communicate something about the relationship between a mum and her kids, in particular at the time those kids are growing more apart, more adult, more strange. It sometimes looks like Mann is trying to work out who her kids are becoming, rather than trying to preserve them in childhood, which is perhaps what a lot of pictures of children try to achieve.
There aren't many technical imperfections in this work, shot I'm guessing with a 5X4 or similar, but there are signs that Mann isn't inhibited by limiting aesthetic conventions. My favorite image in this selection is divided diagonally between an area of deep shadow in which two figures loom and an area of creamy-bright light in which a girls stands tip-toed on a table. Between the under-exposed gloom and the over-exposed glare there is no middle ground, no "correct" exposure, it would probably get one of those helpful stickers labs used to put on wonky prints, but rather than trying to fight the light to produce an image that flattens the extreme difference in exposure, Mann has made an image which ignores a sterile technical convention and is utterly magical as a result.
The rest of the images in the show are all made using the wet-plate collodion process and bear the marks of dust and tears in the emulsion and who knows what else. These images: landscapes, images of corpses in a forensic research facility and portraits of her now-adult children are more and more like paintings. In places the tones seem to flow over the image, often the photo is a combination of areas of highly detailed work and rough expressionistic shapes. The process she has chosen seems to allow Mann to prepare a canvas for chance to paint on.
Also in What Remains she says "I'm so worried that I'm going to perfect this [collodion] technique someday". By perfecting the technique she would certainly squeeze out that element of chance, leaving something much less alive, much less magical. Perhaps it's a counterweight to the way large format photography forces you to be formal, static and methodical - all the improvisation comes after the shutter has closed.
A day after seeing the Sally Mann exhibition I got a coincidentally related email from David Gillanders. David has been experimenting with this same collodion process recently and has started to blog about his experiences including a video showing his awesome mobile darkroom built in a van. This seems like a change of pace for someone whose unflinching reportage work has won many awards and a place on the World Press Photo Masterclass but in David's pictures you can also see a willingness to allow chance to play a role, maybe a background in press photography makes this a necessity? The images that David has made already are stunningly beautiful (see above) and I'm looking forward to seeing and reading more as his blog progresses.
Last week I also went to see the BP Portrait award and saw some inspiring work but also some strangely irritating photo-realist paintings. In fact some were more than photo-realist, seeming to be exact reproductions of photographs in paint, complete with out-of-focus backgrounds and flare. It was a strange contrast to Mann's work to see painstakingly controlled and technically precise images that offer, for me, absolutely no emotional resonance.