The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans Book

It's hard to judge the art books of Sally Mann because, in this town, the libraries and bookstores are too chickenshit to stock them, since most of them contain nekkid chidrens.

So this is the only one I can get from the public library, where it's OK to stock photo books depicting death and decay, but not ones depicting the reality of the living human form from one particular defined age realm, which happens to be a pretty wide one, from 1 to 18.

This book is dedicated to Mann's deceased father, a physician and poet, whose aesthetic informed that of his photographer daughter. Mann writes a lovely short essay at the beginning of this book, part of which says this:

"Where did all of that him-ness go? All that knowledge, the accretion of experiences...It was, as the song says, as if a library burned to the ground."

So, this book is partly a result of Mann's coping with her father's death and her own obsessions with the subject. Death, she says, is "the sculptor of the ravishing landscape," and these images of decay are her attempts to understand that process of creation through natural demise. These images remind me of stills from silent Euro horror films such as Benjamin Christensen's Haxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages) (1922) and Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932); my limited knowledge of the history of photo art as compared to my vast knowledge of cinematic art leads me to this comparison.

The book's stark images are darkly lit and diffuse. I'm not sure how she pulled some of them off; if some of them depict real dead bodies or are cleverly simulated ones. Accompanying some of the images are a few poems about death by famous poets and some sporadic thoughts from Mann. The final series of images in the book are of living people's faces simulating death. I assume these are members of Mann's family.

I'm not sure how to rate a book like this, a lot of the images seem overprocessed to me; I think the idea of some of them is that the images themselves are ephemeral; fated to fade to black.