Public/Private Tensions in the Photography of Sally Mann

This article examines the circulation of Sally Mann's pictures of her children, which were exhibited and published in 1992 under the title Immediate Family. Most of the Immediate Family photographs were made at the Manns' rustic summer house in a wild, isolated area, not far from their home in Lexington, Virginia. The children are often naked or nearly naked, and they are variously dirty, injured, confrontational and flirtatious. Strong and divergent responses to the Immediate Family photographs affirm art historian Anne Higonnet's conclusion that ‘No subject is as publicly dangerous now as the subject of the child's body’. This article expands on the spatial dimension to Higonnet's insight, and argues that the anxieties about Immediate Family stem from photography's refusal, or perhaps confusion about, the division between public and private. The circulation of the Immediate Family project suggests how notions of public and private are negotiated through photography.