Photography Commons^™

The Eighteenth-Century Origins Of Sally Mann’S “New Child”, Victoria L. Pitts

Georgia College Student Research Events

Sally Mann’s 1992 series, Immediate Family, of sixty-five gelatin silver prints captures her three young children—Emmett, Virginia, and Jessie—in various stages of nudity while delighting in the pleasures of childhood games, including roller-skating, swimming, and fishing. Critics have argued that Mann’s overtly sexualized depictions of her children transgress the traditional, unsullied representation of youth in art history. The abandonment of proper social norms for the comportment of children in Mann’s work parallels similarly transgressive themes explored by other twentieth-century photographers, including Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. Arbus and Goldin reveal the world of outsiders in ...