Source: https://art21.org/read/sally-mann-dog-bone-prints/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 20:55:41+00:00

Document:
Sally Mann in her Lexington, Virginia home, 2000. Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 1 episode, "Place," 2001. © Art21, Inc. 2001.
Artist Sally Mann discusses her series of dog bone prints and their place within the history of photography.
ART21: Could you talk about the dog bone prints?
So, then I go collect all the other dog bones, and I bring them in and I take a few more pictures, and then I put them on the wall. And then, before long, the gallery says, “Well, let’s do a show of dog bones.” So, we do a show of dog bones, and then some cynical postmodern critic will come along and say, “Oh my god, look at the show of dog bones; what do you suppose it means?” And it means that I want to see what dog bones look like, photographed.
The same thing happened with the pictures of the children: they were just photographs of my children doing what children do, and they got layered with all of this, often absurd, psychological stuff. You know, these sort of guys sitting around in Yale, stroking their beards with their little leather coated jackets saying, “Well, it must mean this . . .” It means that I was a mother taking pictures of my children. Anyway, I’m just taking pictures of dog bones.
ART21: Can you talk about the use of ordinary objects in the history of photography?
Sally Mann in her Lexington, Virginia home, 2000. Production still from the “Art in the Twenty-First Century” Season 1 episode, “Place,” 2001. © Art21, Inc. 2001.
ART21: Is there anyone else who has specifically influenced this series of photographs?
MANN: I look at a lot of people’s work. I mean, I’m a shameless borrower. But in this case, it happened so spontaneously that I didn’t actually say, “Oh, maybe I’ll take a picture just like that Irving Penn I remember being so good.” These dog bones are just making art the way art should be made, I think, without any overarching reference. Just for fun, if you can imagine that. Art for fun. Sometimes it is fun.
ART21: What do these dog bone prints remind you of?
MANN: Actually, what I like about these dog bones is their ambiguity, because you can’t tell what size they are. First of all, you don’t know what they are. And second of all, they almost look like big, massive, carved stones. You know, if it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography—the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me. I have to admit, the dog bones in the pictures look so massive—they look like Stonehenge or something, sitting there—so it takes you a while to figure out what they are, or maybe you don’t figure it out. I guess, unless you come in here, you don’t. So, maybe they’ll think I’m photographing Brancusi sculptures.
ART21: Is there anything else about your photographic process that you would like to add?
MANN: You mean the moment that’s just enough time to make your quick prayer? There is something about this process—and about the whole 8-by-10 business—that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I’m always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless; I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did. My most successful pictures—I can show you which ones, I think, work the best—are the ones that just look like they were taken with a 35-millimeter [lens].
But it’s a process, and there’s a reverence that goes along with it—that you have to pay your dues to the photo gods, I guess. But there is a kind of reverence that goes along with doing this process. Of course, it has all that vestigial stuff that goes with it. I mean, you can’t do this without thinking, “Oh, Carlton Watkins and all those men in their wagon trains pulled by mules, out there, in the blistering heat, with no running water.” Maybe the gods that you’re paying reverence to are those, the ones that preceded you, because it’s an extraordinarily difficult process in the field.
This interview was originally published on PBS.org in September 2001 and was republished on Art21.org in November 2011.

References: Art21

ART21

ART21
 Art21

ART21

ART21

ART21
 Art21