Carvajal, Doreen (February 1, 1995). "THE NATION; Pornography Meets Paranoia". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved September 8, 2019. Within three months, the book sold out its printing of 10,000 copies. Mann’s children became ever more visible. While they enjoyed being photographed at the time, there was no telling how their opinions of the experience would develop. Mann recalls taking her children to a psychologist to assess the impact her series was having on them; he thought they were just fine.

His subjects are nude adolescents and their families, primarily taken at communes in Northern California and at the Atlantic-coast naturist resort CHM Montalivet in Vendays-Montalivet. Much of his work features California resident Misty Dawn, whom he shot from when she was a child until in her twenties. [2] The timing of Mann’s initial unveiling of “Immediate Family” situated her work within larger discussions about morality in photography. In 1989, U.S. senators Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms railed against artist Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Immersion (Piss Christ), which depicts a plastic figurine of Jesus on a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s urine. The artist had indirectly received partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to exhibit the work, and the senators wanted to prevent similarly “obscene” art from receiving government money. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. subsequently cancelled an exhibition of sexually explicit photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, which had also received NEA funds. In 1990, the director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, Dennis Barrie, went to trial for obscenity after the museum displayed Mapplethorpe’s portraits of semi-nude children and BDSM practices. (He was acquitted later that year.) Naked young people are only a part of his exploration of “a journey from child to adult” – a journey that takes many years to complete. “The better you know your models, the more likely you are to make a picture that is “true”, the artist said, “A single image could be arresting and interesting but unless it was followed by more work it seemed to pose more questions than answers for me”. Sturges primarily works with a large 8x10-inch-format view camera. He has taken some digital photographs but prefers to work with film. [3] Defending her work, Mann stresses the dramatic nature of the photographs and their separation from reality. “These are not my children; they are figures on a silvery paper slivered out of time,” she wrote over two decades later. “I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made.” She cites Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Paul Gauguin as artists whose works shouldn’t be disregarded due to their less-than-angelic lives. (If Mann could dismiss the articles and the letters, more frightening was the stalker her work attracted. One man wrote to the children’s school—in addition to editors and journalists—asking for more information about them. Both Mann and at least one of her children suffered sleepless nights in fear of their own safety.)His photographs appear as cover art on three novels by Jennifer McMahon, Promise Not to Tell, Island of Lost Girls and Dismantled, as well as Karl Ove Knausgård's 1998 debut novel Ute av verden ( Out of the World). The band Ride used some of his photographs on different releases, i.e.: the Twisterella and Leave them All Behind EPs. Beem, Edgar Allen (January 3, 2008). "Catching Up with; The Way of All Flesh". Photo District News. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015 . Retrieved February 23, 2013. a b Boxer, Sarah (March 4, 1998). "Critic's Notebook; Arresting Images of Innocence (or Perhaps Guilt)". The New York Times . Retrieved February 17, 2013. In the early 1990s, photographer Sally Mann transformed one of the most banal elements of family life—the sentimental photo album—into discomfiting, divisive, and ultimately unforgettable artwork. For her series “Immediate Family,” she shot her three children (Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia) in vulnerable positions at their summer home in rural Virginia. The ensuing criticism the images received questioned the line between pornography and fine art and problematized the objectification of children.

A. D. Coleman gave a favourable review of the book in The New York Observer, stating: "Sturges sustains a delicate balance on a very precarious wire ... His struggle is to observe and render his subjects in all of their complexities, trembling on the cusp of change. The result of this long-term, communal effort is one of the most clear-eyed, responsible investigations of puberty and the emergence of sexuality in the medium's history, making a metaphor of the metamorphosis from child to adult." [2] Attempted censorship [ edit ]

When questioned regarding the prosecution, Sturges stated it would waste taxpayers' money, as the photographs "are not done flirtatiously" and have been displayed in major museums. [6] Sturges responded to the indictment labelling the books as "obscene material containing visual reproduction of persons under 17 years of age involved in obscene acts" by stating "This is pretty chilling language because, in fact, the people in my pictures are not engaged in any acts at all. They are living in contexts that are naturist, which is to say that when it's warm and people feel like it, they don't wear clothes", [7] also stating "To find the work obscene, you'd have to find homo sapiens between 1 and 17 inherently obscene, and I find that obscene." [5] Grand Jury Indicts Barnes & Noble for Books Depicting Nude Children". Los Angeles Times. February 19, 1998 . Retrieved February 19, 2013.

For a long time, many decades, I refused to believe that what I thought I wanted when I was 14 turned out to be a protracted form of sexual abuse and exploitation,” she said. “In the aftermath of my time at Northfield Mount Hermon, I fell apart. I had a complete nervous breakdown, suffered from extreme depersonalization and anxiety, to a point where I was not able to function at school or society.” Many of the subsequent images that eventually formed the “Immediate Family” series featured her children on the family farm—in the nude, injured, or in other vulnerable positions. Emmett’s bloody nose, Virginia’s wet bed, and Jessie’s naked dance on a table all became aesthetic fodder through their mother’s lens. In the pictures, their ages range from around one to twelve years old. Mann debuted the series at New York’s Houk Friedman Gallery (now Edwynn Houk Gallery) in the spring of 1992. Later that year, she published the images in a photo book of the same title. Indeed, his photographs are devoid of exploitive or negative characteristics. There is beauty there; there is also truth – but no filth. His models never undress for the photographer – they were nude before he arrived and will be again as he departs. The photographer captures his models – girls and young women from nudist communities – in the surroundings that are organic to them. “Nudity means nothing to anybody here…People are naked…because they are naturists and spend their summers in a resort dedicated to the absence of shame.”

This March, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will open “Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings,” an exhibition of around 115 photographs culled from Mann’s over 40-year career. The southern landscape plays a starring role, whether the photographs are of Civil War battlefields or Mann’s children. A deep sense of drama derives from shadows and light on historically fraught land. “Despite her great talent and prominence...the full range of her work had not yet received sufficient and widespread critical and scholarly attention,” says exhibition curator Sarah Greenough. Sturges was born in 1947 in New York. From 1966 to 1970, he served in the United States Navy as a Russian linguist. He graduated with a BFA in Perceptual psychology and Photography from Marlboro College and received an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. [1] Career [ edit ] Sterngold, James (September 20, 1998). "Censorship in the Age of Anything Goes; For Artistic Freedom, It's Not the Worst of Times". The New York Times . Retrieved February 17, 2013. Perring, Christian (2009). "Review – Misty Dawn". Metapsychology Online Reviess. Archived from the original on May 9, 2017 . Retrieved February 23, 2013.

In 2021, Sturges pled guilty in Franklin County (MA) Superior Court to an unnatural and lascivious act with a child under 16 when he was a dorm head at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in the mid-1970s. He was sentenced to three years' probation. [9] [10] [11] Publications [ edit ] Publications by Sturges [ edit ] This survey will doubtlessly broaden the knowledge of Mann’s career beyond her most indelible, and controversial, series. But the photographs in “Immediate Family” remain worth exploring in their own right.