Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/06/23
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Sally Mann, in here latest landscape work has managed to capture an almost >Matthew Brady/Civil War type look by using old lenses she has collected, as >well as playing with development and printing (some she shot on Ortho film, >which give a different feel again). While I'm no fan of Sally's prima donna persona, and find her family portraits to be theatrical contrivances (albeit exquisitely printed... by someone else), her recent southern landscape series are sublimely beautiful. The one's she'd recently shown at the Reynold's Gallery in Richmond, Virginia were made with an archaic 'wet-plate' process. The process is tedious and dangerous (very toxic), requiring that the negative plate be exposed while still wet with freshly applied emulsion. In the Mann landscapes you can see the surge marks of the emulsion sliding down the plate during exposure. Exposures are a hit-or-miss guess due to the speed variability of the chemical soup, but at best require very long exposures. While the high contrast tonality of Sally's landscapes are not neccesarily inherent to the wet-plate process, she uses it to her pictorial advantage. What is remarkable about these images is the degree of atmosphere and a 'sense of place' that is retained with very little apparent detail. If you think of these images as romantic, then its comes from the premise that romance is about careful editing. Regards, M.Phillips