Sally Mann, photographer and writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:44My castaway this week is the photographer Sally Mann. She's been described as a memoirist, exploring her own story and that of the American South through her pictures and more recently as a writer. Her work has made her one of the most influential photographers in the US today. She was born in 1950s Virginia into a bohemian family. Her father was a country doctor who collected modern art and gave her her first camera. She met her husband Larry, then a blacksmith, at 18. Their family became her subject. The atmospheric images she captured of their three children on their remote, self-sufficient farm in rural Lexington garnered critical acclaim, while also provoking censure from some conservative commentators.

1:27In her work, beauty sits alongside loss. Her landscapes of former Civil War battlegrounds, studies of the human body, both living and dead, and her intimate portraits of her husband, who has muscular dystrophy, explore the interplay between life and decay, mourning what is gone while eulogising what survives. She says,

2:04Sally Mann, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you. I think we should start with that splinter of ice, Sally. How does that help you take a great shot? It just helps with the objectivity, I think. There's plenty of order. I've got mountains of that. Buckets. Buckets of it. But every so often you have to be kind of ruthless. And do you always know when you've got the shot? Most of the time, yeah, but not always. There's some sleepers that come along and they come along at different times. Sometimes you'll develop your film and you realize that you'd actually taken a good picture that you thought was going to be a dog.

2:41And then at other times, you'll go back, as I've been doing, 25, 30, 40 years. And you'll realize that the pictures that you had thought were important then, you were trying to cram it into the glass slipper of a concept, right? But in fact, some of the pictures that you didn't use were talking about other things that you maybe weren't interested in at the time, but that are interesting to me now. And what about a shoot day? What's a typical shoot day like for you? Is there such a thing? No, there really isn't. It depends on what I'm photographing. When I was photographing the children, the camera was just kind of always set up, and I was hoping that they would do something interesting.

3:22And then I would hope that I could freeze them long enough to get the picture. Now it's more just packing. Well, the camera lives in my car. It's a big view camera, a Deardorff 8x10 view camera. It's just a question of getting in the car and driving around. Sally, you talked about how your own perspective on your work can change over the years, and shift. How much thought do you give to other people's perspective and what they take away from your work? Are you thinking about that as part of your process? I probably should think a little more about it, huh? It truly has shocked me to find how people interpret my work.

3:58And it shouldn't. I'm just naive. When people, in my view, misunderstand my work, it's always a surprise to me. What kind of spirit would you like them to approach it with? Well, with an open mind, of course, right? But that doesn't always happen, and particularly not now in America anyway. In the current climate, you mean? Yeah, in the current climate. I thought I was done worrying about it maybe 10 or 15 years ago, but I'm more worried about it now than I was then, I think. Some of your pictures were taken out of a gallery in Texas earlier this year, weren't they, by local officials? Yeah. How did that feel to you?

4:34That must be a tough experience. It was scary. I was very surprised. But in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have been. And I think it's a harbinger of things to come. I think this is going to happen more and more to people. The pictures of the children are just a flashpoint in the new Christian nationalist movement. I don't want to rile the bull. I just want, I want to be left alone. So I'm not showing that work. And that was just sort of an anomalous exhibition. And I thought it would be harmless to put it on the walls. but bad decision. Yeah. You know, when you said it'll happen more and more to people, are you talking about other artists?

5:12I am, yeah. And institutions. I mean, look what's happening to the whole Smithsonian. It's just getting whitewashed, absolutely. Sally, you're with us sharing your music today and the discs that are important to you. Do you listen while working in the darkroom? That's what made this so hard. Oh, my God. As you can see, I've got reams of paper. I've got notes of all the songs. Notes on notes. Oh, I listen to music. Music, it's my madeleine. I can place exactly where I was and what picture I was taking when I hear certain songs and what I was printing when I hear certain songs. It's some kind of weird synesthesiac, Nabokovian, weird relationship I have with music.

5:57So this was very difficult for me. And does that mean that you sometimes, you know, you can hear the music when you look at the picture then? Does it work the other way around? Yes, exactly. it's weird in my brain. Well, we're looking forward to spending some time there. I think we should dive in with your first disc. Tell us about your first choice today, Salimant. What is it and why are you taking it to the island? I would take Keith Jarrett. And in particular, I would take the Colton Concert Part 1 because of the passion that he develops with the music. Almost, it starts out kind of slowly and then before long you realise he's almost like making love to the piano.

6:32He's groaning and grunting, and it sounds completely spontaneous. He probably rehearsed it a thousand times. I have no idea. But that degree of passion in the production of his art is what I feel sometimes in my own.

7:10Thank you.

7:43Keith Jarrett playing at the 1975 Cologne concert. And it was wonderful to see you just lost in that track as well, Sally. Oh God, I just love it. I love it. Transported. So listen, let's go back to the beginning. Sally Mann, you were born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. the youngest of three children, I think, to Robert and Elizabeth. And your dad was the local doctor. Tell me a little bit about him. How do you remember him? Oh, he was remarkable. I devoted the whole last part of my first book, Hold Still, to my father because he was a cipher on the one hand, but he also was just so extraordinary.

8:19I had to dig into his life and how he turned out the way he did. Born in Dallas, Texas, right there. But a liberal, an Adelaide Stevenson liberal, and Americans will know what that means, like a real diehard liberal, and a very, very compassionate man. You said that he was a cipher, so, you know, hard to get to know, kind of like remote in a way. Definitely remote. He didn't talk much. He was a deeply humanistic and intellectual man. He read everything, traveled widely. And great taste in art as well. And great taste in art. What was he buying when you were growing up? What kind of thing? Well, he bought Kandinsky.

8:56Actually, toward the end, I didn't like what he bought, so we won't go there. But early on, and he bought Kandinsky in the 30s. And then one day he ran into Cy Twombly walking down the street in 1952, I think. And Cy was carrying one of his scribble paintings under his arm. And Daddy asked him about it because they knew Cy. And Cy said, well, I've got this painting. You want it, Doctor? And Daddy said, sure. And he reached his back pocket and pulled out a$100 bill. And that's how we got this amazing Cy Twombly. And Cy Twombly remained a friend of yours throughout his life. Oh, indeed. You would sit in front of the supermarket with him shooting the breeze, wouldn't you?

9:33Yeah, we'd just drive around. So you told me a little bit about your father, Robert. Tell me about your mother, Elizabeth. They were the most mismatched pair, you could imagine. She was from Boston, but also was poor. Her father was a Welsh immigrant and they had no money. And she had ambitions. She was very smart and strikingly beautiful. And she had ambitions, but they couldn't be realized. She wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to be a doctor. So she ended up working in a lab doing blood tests or something. She looked out the window one day and she saw this young doctor, white coat and all, and he got out of a chauffeured car.

10:12And every day he would be driven home to wherever home was in Boston to lunch and driven back. and she just thought it was appalling, you know, that kind of privilege. And then she met him and they fell in love. You've written in your memoir that as a Southern family in the 50s and 60s, you were simply different and you all knew it. Tell me more about that. It was so conservative. People were relaxed and they all joined the country club and played golf and the fathers went to work and the mothers stayed home and raised their children. And that wasn't my life exactly. They were vehemently opposed to the country club because it wouldn't let Jews in or blacks, of course, or anybody, you know, that they now are obliged to.

10:58My parents were just a little different. They didn't drive the typical cars and they wouldn't let me go to Bible class in grade school, for example. It was mandatory. What did that involve? Writing a letter and saying she's just not coming? Yeah. And then I would get pulled out of class and they would seat me outside the principal's office where the bad kids got seated. And all the kids going into lunch would walk by and think I'd done something bad. And this was every day. And how did you feel about that? I wanted to go to Bible class, right? Of course. I was desperate to take Bible class. And what about your relationship with your parents?

11:36because they sound larger than life and completely fascinating, but you have written about not being able to form a kind of emotional bond with them in the way that you might have liked to, particularly when you were young, and having the feeling of wanting to back then. In later in life, I had a much better relationship with them. But early on, they were pretty... A lot of the mothers in that time, and particularly in the South, they had help. So early on in 1947, I think, they hired Virginia Carter, a black woman, who was renowned for her cooking. And she came to work for my parents, and she worked for them for 50 years.

12:17And she raised all three of us and was kind and compassionate and taught us to be likewise and was an extraordinary presence in our lives. And, you know, I can't say she replaced my mother. I sort of wanted to have a mother, but I guess in a way she did. Am I right in thinking that you named your daughter after her? I did. We called her Gigi. She had learned to read, which was really unusual. You know, there was no education for black people back then, but somehow she had learned to read. And so she was the person who read me stories when she had time. But she, I mean, she worked really hard. And she was ironing and cooking and cleaning.

13:00She did everything. My mother used to sort of lie on the couch, I remember her vividly, with an ashtray on her stomach and her stocking feet sort of rubbing together languidly and smoking a cigarette and reading the New Yorker or Harper's or The Atlantic while all this bustle was around her. Children were being raised, her food was getting cooked. You know, that was just the way it was. I don't hold it against her, but it was a strange sight. I think we should take a moment for some music. What are you going to play us next? I chose Odetta because she was, for me, the voice of the civil rights movement.

13:39And that was a very important aspect of my childhood. My parents, I mean, they didn't march because there were no marches, but they did support the civil rights movement in oblique ways. Like my mother paid Virginia, Gigi, twice what everybody else paid per hour. And I'm ashamed to tell you what that is, but I think it was something like$5 a week or something like that. It's appalling. And she started getting death threats. Letters written to her, yeah, I've seen them, for rocking the boat in the community by paying so much money to her maid. and Gigi used to sing these songs to you Odetta's songs to you Gigi had an amazing voice she would take me to her church sometimes and it was like waves of sound were washing over me she sang she would sing me to sleep and she would sing you know all the pretty horses and a lot of the old southern ballads but her voice was so rich and so reminiscent of this singer Odetta it was so hard to decide which song exactly but I chose Take This Hammer.

14:49I don't want you Cold and shirk I don't want you Cold and shirk I don't want you Cold and shirk

15:18And smiley, buddy Great, huh? Fabulous. Odessa. And take this hammer, I don't want it. So, Sally Mann, Gigi had a fascinating life. I mean, she lived to be 100 and she had six children of her own. I mean, incredible. I know that you've met up with her family as an adult and talked about the dynamics between the two lives that she had, you know, her life with your family and with her own family. Was that a difficult conversation to have? And, you know, the pull and the tension between the two. I did burst into tears. I mean, my cluelessness as a child is so painful to me even now. I never thought it odd that Gigi came on Christmas morning and cooked and served and washed up all day on Christmas and then went home to her own six children, you know.

16:11So I asked them, these are her grandchildren, actually, and they said, you know, it was just the way it was. They did not in any way make me feel as miserable as I felt. They didn't pile on at all. They were very kind. They said, we just had Christmas later than everybody else. They're so gracious about it. And I think they love that, you know, you captured some really beautiful photographs of her and that she's part of your artwork and your story, too. Yeah, I mean, they knew I loved her and they knew she loved me, which every white person says that in the South. Oh, my mammy just loved me. But she did love me.

16:51There's no question. It's interesting that you say, you know, you were as a child, obviously, completely unaware of the racial and political dynamics of the South and family life and everything that was going on around you. When did you start to understand what was happening? When did your eyes become open to the civil rights movement, to the conversations that were going on? Shamefully late. When I was sent away to school at age 15, 16 to a very liberal boarding school in Vermont, that's when I had a black teacher. There weren't any black teachers. In fact, the schools were segregated when I was growing up.

17:24And he very, very gently illuminated the truth to me. But prior to that, my brother Chris had been very involved in the civil rights movement. He sat in down in North Carolina in the drugstores and he went to prison 17 times. 17 times? 17 times. Was he hurt? Yeah, he was. He was beaten. He was pissed on. He was hit by a sword. He was the litany of things that happened to him in the course of his civil rights activism is really quite astounding. And he's lucky to be alive. It was the same time that the three boys, Shermer, Goodwin, and I can't remember the third one, were found in the in the dam in Mississippi.

18:05So they were white protesters. Yeah. He was in that exact same situation, was thrown in jail. It was a really dangerous time. And Gigi, Gigi was more scared than anybody. I tell a story in Hold Still about one day picking up, there was a crippled black boy who lived in our town, and he was walking the six miles between our nearest town and Lexington, and I picked him up, and he was extremely reticent to get in the car, but he did. He sat in the back, and I dropped him off, and I was feeling all virtuous and do-goody, and I got home, and I told Gigi about it, and I have never seen her so angry.

18:43she backed me up against the wall with her two arms and held me there and she said never do that again and I thought oh she was really worried about me no what she was worried about was the boy the risk that he took let's have some more music Sally it's your third choice today what are we going to hear next it's the dough it's the song trustful hands I chose it because I asked my daughter, Jessie, how she would like to be represented. And I asked her because if I'm on a desert island, I want my children's voices with me. And the other two are represented by their actual voices. But she's not a singer.

19:29So she suggested this, and I think it's an absolutely apt choice. She has adopted two foster children, and she felt that if she was going to be represented by any action of her life, it would be the trustful hands that she is now holding these children with. Oh, that's a beautiful film. She's an artist, and she also has a PhD in neuroscience, and she's applied both skills to raising these two boys, their brothers. We are sentimental animals We are on the call for criminals We were meant to make a thing more too bad To break the laws of gravity to our

20:28The dough and trustful hands So Sally, let's talk about you as a teenager. You mentioned that you went to boarding school at 15. What kind of teenager were you? Difficult, stroppy. Rebellious? A bit rebellious. But I didn't get kicked out, although there were some near misses, some brushes. So it was at school, at boarding school, that you began to take photos with that Leica that your dad gave you, his old camera. I was often working and still do with a sort of overarching concept. And so back then I did a lot of photography in the poorest county in America. It's Harlan County in Kentucky. I went down there as a nurse's assistant and I did a lot of pictures and I was really trying to show what true poverty looked like.

21:19None of them were very successful, but, you know, I tried to say things with my pictures. Yeah, right from the beginning. Right from the beginning. You went on to graduate from college with the highest distinction possible and a degree in literature. You'd married your husband Larry by then. Life was coming together. What were your plans at that point? What did you think your future would look like? I wanted to be a poet, but back then you couldn't earn a living as a poet. So the only other thing I was good at was photography and I had to earn a living. So that's what I did. So what kind of pictures were you taking?

21:51I worked for a university, so I was doing all the headshots for the football team and the grip and grin ones where someone gives a check to the university and there's a handshake. The most boring, miserable work you've ever imagined, but that's how I got good. You described meeting Larry as the universe gave me a pass on all of the rebellious things that I'd done. Right. Because you came face to face with Larry Mann. I did. How did that happen? I lucked out. I saw him across a room and he paid no attention to me, but I just fixed my glittering, avaricious eyes on him and said he's mine. And just, I think I proposed to him within the first month.

22:31Oh, yeah. He was great. I mean, he still is great. We've been married 55 years. I know that Larry's family went through some incredibly difficult times. A couple of years later, his mother shot her husband and then turned the gun on herself, which is absolutely horrifying. How did you find out what had happened? Literally, the sheriff drove up and said, you know, there's been this terrible thing. We were not close with them. They really hated me. I was not who they wanted Larry to marry. What did they want? They wanted a society girl. They wanted someone with money and with prestige that would, you know, float all the boats.

23:10and their boat was in need of floating. Did they make their displeasure felt? Was it obvious? Oh, very obvious. They actually did everything they could to torpedo the marriage in the 10 years before they killed themselves. And I wonder sometimes if the success of our marriage contributed to her decision to do what she did. And the background to it was that it emerged that they were addicts. Yeah, they were using a lot of drugs. He was a psychiatrist, and he had access to them, and what he couldn't get, he got a friend to get for him. He was prescribing prescription drugs to other people, and also both of them were using them themselves.

23:45They were using them heavily, yeah. But you spent time with him. You said you weren't close. Yeah, we would see them as... We would drive back and forth to Bennington College, where I was in school for a brief two years, and we would stop by there. And they also drank really heavily. They were almost non-functional. Yeah, but she was functional enough to pull out that shotgun. A very unusual situation, a woman doing that. Yeah. Everyone says, how did Larry survive that? He actually was quite resigned. He wasn't surprised, particularly. I mean, it's a shock when something like that happens. But he handled it really quite well.

24:23He was a perfect partner for me. Unflappable. Unflappable. And one of your subjects right from the beginning. Yeah, true. The next show I'm going to have will be at Gagosian and it's all pictures of Larry that I've been doing for years and years. Sally it's time to go to the music your fourth choice today what's it going to be? it's my daughter Virginia at age maybe 15, 16 singing a solo at her boarding school it is Oh Holy Night and I hope she doesn't kill me for this but it's so beautiful and it's so her it's so precise it's so graceful were you there for the performance? did you get to watch?

25:03see that's the worst part no I was not and she'll never let me forget it. I was not there for this performance. But you'll have it with you on your desert island. I sure will.

25:38Help us remain, Christ is the Lord, Oh, grace is made forever It's more and more

26:08Forever Just beautiful. Your daughter, Virginia Mann, singing the solo in O Holy Night with the concert choir of St Andrew's School, Delaware. Sally. What a beautiful voice, Sally Mann. Does she still sing? I think she does, but she doesn't have a lot of time. She's got three children and she's a lawyer in New York City. Oh, wow. Yeah. We've talked about two of your children already, Sally, and I'm glad because they became such a feature in your work as your career began to take off. You were mother to three children and you photographed them for the Immediate Family series. Tell me what inspired it.