Pay attention to this Sally Mann artist. She has a lot to say. I had to listen with my eyes, though. My ears were useless. Her language, her vision, made me squirm more than once. In her book, Immediate Family, Sally Mann tells without words the story of how her camera sees three children. They are her children - teetering on the edge of adolescence. As an observer, I was never sure which scenes she staged and which she stumbled upon. The photographs, often showing her two daughters and her son without clothing, in situations that have a certain sensuality, are disturbing on one level, and completely intriguing on another. I paged through the book, thinking about her strong content, about her obvious intimacy with her camera and her children. Would I take photos like this of my children? I noticed the technical things I’ve begun to see in photographs. Wide range of contrast. Delicate to strong shades of gray. Density. Balance. Here, strong depth of field. There, a shallowness that enhances the subject. I turn one more page.

       Smoothing the page with my fingers, feeling the cool, slick texture of the paper, I am arrested by the image in front of me. This time, she must certainly have gone too far.  As the photograph called, “Hayhook”, draws me in, I think if I glance over my shoulder I will find disapproval in the eyes of someone noticing the picture in front of me. At first glance, it almost resembles any family’s casual snapshot. A summer cottage kind of setting. Lawn chairs, screened windows, people sitting about conversing, relaxing, wearing shorts, tee shirts, casual clothes, casual attitudes. Yes, yes, I know there is something I am not acknowledging. Wait. There are toys on the floor, scattered, discarded, no longer interesting to whatever child abandoned them. A very young girl, tanned like a Coppertone ad, stands in the middle ground of the picture, completely at ease and absolutely unselfconscious. She has a long, curved, black object of some sort in her mouth and she is exploring it with her lips, as children do when eyes and fingers don’t give enough information. Nothing extraordinary in these. Nothing here to disturb. My eyes continue to move across the shiny page, taking in tones, lights, and darks, grays that are neutral, completely acceptable. There are, of course, dark shadows, too. And one area of the photograph that keeps pulling me in. A bright white child, zone 9 at least. There has been some dodging done here, I am certain. But I glance and move my eyes to look in other places on the page for other details.

       Two large old trees have been allowed to grow up through the floor in this cabin. No, not just allowed, they have been accommodated by a plank floor cutout to give them a place to grow.  The roof is also configured to make room for them. One tree, in the background of the photo, is perfectly focused, even though it is in a fairly dark shadow. The detail is nearly touchable. I know why the artist focused it so harshly and maybe dodged it to bring out the lights there. She wanted it to stop my eye. She wanted me to decide to look back to the left and study the other child. The one hanging from a hay hook. She is long, pale, ghostly white. Her body is flat. The sharply defined tree separates this child from her grandmother, who sits to the right, reading a book. The foreground tree, softly blurred, has a similar job. Again, it directs my eye back into the frame. It divides the hanging child from the rest of her family, also kind of blurred, conversing lazily at the left of the photograph. The trees seem to form a cage for her.

       I’m not ready to look at her yet. So I see explore wood texture in the floorboards. I like wood. It’s durable. It can take abuse and still exhibit an innate beauty that often improves with stress and distress.  Is the girl like this? It seems the photograph is. It is an image that can speak to an audience of any time period and elicit a strong response. The floorboards make me look at the rest of the wood in the scene. The crossbuck door speaks to me of strength, too. The rustic, wide board siding on the walls, with strong vertical lines, is another symbol of stability and strength. Is it the family unit that Sally Mann is reflecting when she emphasizes the rigid, strong, enduring quality of the wood surfaces? They are all in focus. It seems that she uses focus as a tool to point out noteworthy concepts in her picture. The edges of the frame are all softly blurred, as though she pivoted the camera while she tripped the shutter. There is a roundness to the blur – predicting perhaps, the roundness that the prepubescent girl-child will take on as her body continues to mature. So, it seems that Sally Mann is telling me I can peak at this frozen moment of time in her family. She doesn’t offer me everything. She conceals some of the edges of the scene, as though she withholds at least some of the secrets that her family, like all other families, has. But oddly, one secret she doesn’t shield or conceal at all is the ripening of her daughter’s body.

       Most mothers are afraid of the harm that can come to a girl-child as she wrestles with the magic that changes her body from baby to baby-bearer. Some of us will go to great effort to conceal, shield, and deny the existence of a sexual or sensuous nature of our girl-children. Some of us might try to live vicariously though our daughter’s puberty to right the perceived wrongs left over from our own. And some of us will allow nature to take its course, offering our daughters support, encouragement, and the benefit of our own experience. But this mom, this Sally Mann, displays her child’s vulnerable, mystical, magical, ripening sensuality. Sally, I am not allowed, by social convention, to admit prurient interest in a child-body.

       I look fully at this child finally. I have dutifully absorbed the rest of the scene. No one can say the first thing I zeroed in on was this child. I saw the sunlight peeking in the rooftop first. I inspected the depth that allows a clear perception of the texture of trees seen out the far back window of the cabin. I even got acquainted with the other people who are part of this record. The child’s grandmother, her sister, her aunt