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Authorities have confiscated numerous photographs from a Texas museum following objections to their portrayal of children, including works by photographer Sally Mann. Earlier this week, a search warrant was issued and executed to retrieve several images exhibited at a group showcase at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The photographs are part of a multi-artist show titled Diaries of Home, featuring creations by women and nonbinary artists.
Back in December, Texas officials requested an inquiry into some of the showcased images; a warrant was subsequently issued earlier this month. The contested photographs have been taken down from the museum as potential evidence, according to the local publication The Dallas Express.
The Diaries of Home exhibition featured several pieces of Mann’s creations, including Popsicle Drips (1985), which portrays a naked male child with liquid on his skin, and The Perfect Tomato (1990), featuring a nude female child standing on tiptoes atop a picnic table. The museum’s website warns patrons that the collection “includes mature themes that may be unsettling for some visitors.”
Nevertheless, the images – captured in the late Eighties and early Nineties – also faced backlash when they were initially showcased in the traveling exhibition Immediate Family and published in a book of the same title. In 1992, Mann was informed by a federal prosecutor that at least eight of her images could lead to her arrest.
More than a decade later, Mann authored an article in the New York Times reflecting on the family photographs and the ensuing controversy. The images were taken over a decade on the family’s rural property in Virginia, which Mann described as so isolated that it lacked both electricity and running water.
“While only a small fraction of them showed a nude child, I was relentlessly characterized as the woman who photographed her naked kids, a claim that fueled my detractors, many of whom had never actually viewed the work,” she penned.
In the article, Mann noted that she included her children in both the capturing and editing of the images, providing each child with copies of their photographs and allowing them to discard any that they preferred not to share.
“Determining exactly where to draw that disturbing line is challenging, particularly in cases where the subject is so eager to give,” she observed. “But how can they demonstrate such willingness? Is it audacity or innocence? Those individuals who fearlessly present themselves to the lens mesmerize me with the purity and sincerity of their vulnerability.”
In 1990, Mann recounted that a critic took one of her daughter’s images and republished it without consent, obscured by black bars over the child’s face and genital area. The girl replied to the critic with a letter stating, “Dear Sir, I don’t appreciate the way you crossed me out.”
Immediate Family is not the only series by Mann that captures the human form with an unsettling openness, which Reynolds Price of Time once articulated as “a passion that is virtually indistinguishable from love.” Her body of work also includes images of a nude man with late-onset muscular dystrophy (Proud Flesh) and photographs of human remains being examined at the University of Tennessee (Body Farm).
“To create my photographs,” Mann noted, “I must consistently observe the people and places I cherish. I need to approach this with both devotion and detached assessment, combining the passions of both eye and heart, while harboring a fragment of ice within that fervent heart.”
In a synopsis of the Diaries of Home exhibition, the museum indicates, “The creatives in Diaries of Home employ the language of documentary photography, establishing an immediate sense of familiarity and comprehension. Yet, the pieces challenge the presumed authenticity of the visuals by probing the medium’s intrinsic subjectivity through compelling fiction and drama or by magnifying everyday situations.”
The Diaries of Home exhibition commenced in November and is anticipated to run until February 02.
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