1998.12
Georgia, Untitled (Black Spot)
Artist
Sally Mann
(1951 - );
Sally Mann
(1951 - )
Title
Georgia, Untitled (Black Spot)
Creation Date
1996
Century
20th century
Dimensions
38 in. x 48 in. (96.52 cm x 121.92 cm)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
North America, United States, Georgia
Medium and Support
gelatin silver print
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
1998.12
In the 1990s Mann began photographing unpopulated landscapes using a damaged lens, sometimes installed in reverse, and late-nineteenth-century techniques of Pictorialism such as lack of sharp focus and surface manipulation. Untitled, from the series Deep South, was printed by the photographer in 1997 and toned with tea to achieve an atmospheric quality; the partially obscured landscape suggests a place that can never be fully known. The contemporary use of antiquated photographic techniques enacts a kind of process-based time travel and became a favorite tool for Mann as she grappled with the region’s complicated history of loss, violence, and racism. These images provoked a historical shift that Mann herself experienced when she discovered a cache of glass-plate negatives taken of her hometown in the years after the Civil War. “Living in the South” she says, “often means slipping out of temporal joint, a peculiar phenomenon that I find both nourishes and wounds.”
