“That part of the South is a kind of netherworld. I was asking the land to give up its ghosts. Collodion is the ideal medium for such landscapes. It is contemplative, memorial… In the face of some extraordinary sight or place you do not just take a picture. It is ceremonial. I am not a religious person, but there is an experience of communion in wet-plate photography. It is not a drive-by shooting.”
– Sally Mann
Interview with Sally Mann. See Lyle Rexer, from Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 80-81.
Profligate physical beauty is easy to find in the South, but what gins up the ecstasy is the right light, the resonant, beating heart of that light, unique to the south. The landscape appears to soften before your eyes and becomes seductively vague, as if inadequately summoned up by some shiftless creator casually neglectful of the details.
Sally Mann, Hold Still (213)
Leave a Reply