Now Online 48 Hours Only - Bethany 4 by Sally Mann

Now Online 
48 Hours Only

SALLY MANN

Bethany 4, 2019–21
Platinum print
8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm)
Framed: 13 × 15 × 1 1/4 inches (33 × 38.1 × 3 cm)
Edition 1/3 + 1 AP
$13,500

November 17–23, 2021

Sally Mann is known for her photographs of intimate and familiar subjects rendered both sublime and disquieting. Her projects explore the complexities of familial relationships, social realities, and the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature, history, and memory. Central to Mann’s investigation are the landscapes that she has photographed both near her home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and across the South for over three decades. Often using a view camera, Mann draws on the history of both her medium and the Southern landscape to produce photographs that are expressive and elegiac.

Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively #online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.

Artist Spotlight: Sally Mann features a new photograph by the artist, from a never-before-seen series, Vinculum. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com

About the Artwork

Since my place and its story were givens, it remained for me to find those metaphors; encoded, half-forgotten clues within the southern landscape.

—Sally Mann

Depicting farmland along Bethany Road in Lexington, Virginia, Sally Mann’s Bethany 4 (2019–21) shows a patch of raking light illuminating a hillside’s undulating curves and grassy scrub. The remainder of the slope is obscured by darkness interrupted by parallel tire tracks and the ragged edges of a puddle. On the hill’s crest are the bare limbs of trees, while power lines in the scene traverse the image’s top-right corner, rendered only faintly visible by Mann’s unique photographic process.

Taken in the late evening of January 22, 2021, Bethany 4 is a photograph from the series Falls the Shadow, part of a larger body of work titled Vinculum—meaning a unifying bond or link. Vinculum consists of three thematically related series: The Still Point (2016–17), Falls the Shadow (2019–21), and There Is Only the Dance (1973–2020), all titled after phrases from poetry by T. S. Eliot. Mann began this body of work in 2016 while driving through the Mississippi Delta, when, following telephone and utility lines across the landscape, she found significance in the communications infrastructure that connects individuals and communities. She later continued to explore this subject near her home in the Shenandoah Valley. The Vinculum photographs emerged as meditations on the lines that connect us, our failures to engage with one another on personal, social, and political levels, and the fundamental connections we share.

Mann captured the scene in Bethany 4 with an 8 × 10 Deardorff view camera (fig. 1) to produce a high-contrast orthochromatic negative, adapting a medium used primarily for offset lithography and here recalling the look of a nineteenth-century photograph. Bethany 4 is a platinum print, the result of a process that generates a matte finish of subtle tones. As she recounts, “There was no question in my mind about how it had to be printed: it was soft, it was elemental, it was atmospheric—and there’s something about platinum that does all that.” Mann’s hand-brushed application of the developing solution reveals the grain of the paper and allows it to become an element of the composition. This strategy is in keeping with her use of antique lenses and alternative processes to produce serendipitous and expressive visual effects like the selective focus and intentional overexposure seen in Virginia, Untitled (Right Angle) (1995; fig. 2), from her Virginia series.

Bethany 4 was made following a time of seemingly insurmountable national division—two days after Inauguration Day in 2021. Despite the ubiquity of the physical lines it pictures, the bonds that unite us as a society then felt, to Mann, increasingly frayed and incapable of transmitting meaningful exchange. Here, she found inspiration in James Baldwin’s reflection on the capacity of art and literature to inspire solace and empathy: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”