We’ve been to museums the last couple of weekends. First it was an exibition about death called “Gruesome Death” or something. Then last week we checked out the Modern Museum here in Stockholm where they hade some really cool stuff. And so yesterday we had plans on seeing something but quite some time passed before we got on the subway and well, we soon understood we wouldn’t make it. Then we found out that there was a free Sally Mann photo exibition at Kulturhuset.
Wow! Mann’s stuff is really super fantastic! It’s no wonder all kinds of people in high places, and on boards and art societies and what not call her the american photo wonder of the last decade! She’s dug out a bunch of decade old cameras (and some modern ones too I guess) to capture her surroundings in the woods and swamps of Virginia. And her children – as natural as they get.
Naturaly the know-betters of the world shouted out loud in the early 90s when she first published her pictures. (Word has it she went up to FBI before publishing asking: “Are you gonna make something out of this?”). Well some people thought of her pictures as “pornographic” and “hard evidence of child exploitation”. Mann had taken pictures of her kids naked doing everything from swimming to checking out dead animals.
Funny isn’t it? I know there’s a full slide show at home from when I was about half a year old. You know, dad took these really cool pictures of me naked on some kind of velvet cloth. Experimenting with lights and stuff. If I was to publish it on the web then I’m sure I’d be labeled a pedophile.
Perhaps even after I told people that it was I who was on the picture.
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