One picture captured my eyes and I checked its name, thinking it really reflected her feature. Sally Mann, I just only have seen about the children of Sally Mann, embracing some special pleasant feelings before passing them by. She approached an object for love with slightly different ways and views. I got a feeling that her special eyes and emotions enabled her to adopt a way to package and put forward her object of love, and that she intended to leave what she desires to reveal remaining unchanged by any means. Like a stuffed animal to some extent, or like drawing deep in lithograph. I watched her refreshed look in front of me after going through a stage of understanding her task that way. What changed was not her children but the very breathing space for her and her children.
I imagined ‘Sally Mann’ expressed her place surrounding her as if it described her children. I came to think it was fantasy-like, super-natural and super-real, but at the same time it was her own start, full of affection. Besides she had a feeling that a place she was looking at and residing in was what she deeply loved —- like the belief that it will stay beside her everlastingly until she departs her life.
Her feelings displayed in her previous work <Immediate Family> seemed to transfer from her children to the living space for her and her family. The living space for the people she loves. As I also already had such a view, I was able to understand her all the more, just thinking she could have caught my eyes. The space I and we live, not many people around me and passersby do —- the moment they are all gone in the space, I think, would not have far more different feelings and meanings, but possibly have the unique power and energy of the space itself. All of us feel burdened as we feel and think about the coexistence of “space” and “humans” separately. This is because their separation is really difficult to make.
A photographer should step in there also to seek a space where we are not seen around. But if a photographer stands at the back of a camera, I imagine many people can experience intensely their space through me though I am present as a photographer. That way she conveyed to us her own views and emotions toward her space separated through her unique way.
The space for a belief, never forgettable and changeable.
LIGHT
