"Immediate Family"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that study of Mann's photography "Immediate Family" reveals an exhibitionist treatment of her subjects, which is publicly revealing of the exceptionally private. However, this is not necessarily a condemnation, because a significant portion of artistic photography is driven by the desire to reproduce the normal in a light that is extraordinary, shocking or taboo. The author states that there is nothing unethical in Mann's treatment of her subjects. Mann's pictures are directed at a group without coherent ethics, a complex group of spectators. The paper concludes that the scope of her collection is a testimony to her passion for the children, for the land they inhabit and for the thin slice of time in which the world is their playground.

From the Paper:

"In "Immediate Family", Mann revisits the myth of beautiful, innocent youth and shatters it. Some of the pictures speak to the naivete of children: Virginia sleeping on the porch with a crocodile approaching behind her, Jessie smiling in a tutu next to a freshly-shot deer in the bed of a pickup truck. Yet any parent worth their salt will have seen what is portrayed in "The Wet Bed", or "Emmett's Bloody Nose". Many pictures show the children covered in dirt, caked in baking flour, spattered with leaves and garden rubble. In a particularly impressive shot, "He is Very Sick", Jessie and Emmett lounge in perfect boredom next to the bed of a dying man. Their faces beg for their parents to take them home, to stop subjecting them to the misery of death."

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