One person at least harassed them for years. The people who always come running when there is a stoning afoot turned up. As refracted by all of her bad press, actually, Mann became a figure of a favourite kind of modern controversy: a bad mother, one apparently willing to sacrifice the psychological wellbeing of her children on the altar of art (or, as many thought they had diagnosed it, selfishness). Presented through the lens of a dubious outsider, Mann came off as alternately imperious and oblivious to the potential objections some might have to her presentation of her children in the nude. They gleaned wider attention than art photographs typically got in the early 1990s, when Mann was the subject of a lot of bad press, and specifically a profile in the New York Times magazine that saw a journalist (now arts critic Richard Woodward) lift her life and work almost wholly from its context. The photographs don’t stand alone they come with a tailwind of controversy. T he visual force of Sally Mann’s photographs of her three children – the collection called Immediate Family – is such that every article about her, even this review of her new memoir Hold Still, must begin with some mention of them.
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