Sally mann biography summary of thomas

Plays [ edit ]. Poetry [ edit ]. Essays [ edit ]. Compilations in English [ edit ]. Research [ edit ]. Databases [ edit ]. TMI Research [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. In Ramsaran, Susan ed. ISBN Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 31 May Retrieved 25 January Thomas Mann: Life as a work of art: A biography. Bick'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Archived from the original on 1 July Retrieved 5 January Retrieved 19 November Deutsche Welle.

Archived from the original on 18 November Retrieved 17 November University of California Press. Insel Verlag, Leipzig Cornell University Press. Archived from the original on 19 February Retrieved 16 January Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. JSTOR j. S2CID Archived from the original on 1 December Retrieved 27 November Michigan Quarterly Review.

Cliffs Notes. New Global Studies. Archived from the original on 5 May Retrieved 19 September Einstein on peace. Internet Archive. New York, Schocken Books. BND: Archivo del Escritor. Archived from the original on 28 October Retrieved 19 October Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift , ; 2—4 — Kindle Edition. University of Hawaii Press. The lady with the Borzoi : Blanche Knopf, literary tastemaker extraordinaire 1st ed.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. OCLC April Archived from the original on 19 December Retrieved 14 June The Nobel Prize. Archived from the original on 26 December Retrieved 11 November Archived from the original on 30 June Retrieved 16 June Warner Angell, Joseph ed. The Thomas Mann reader. New York: Knopf. The New York Times. ISSN Archived from the original on 5 November Retrieved 24 January The German Quarterly.

JSTOR Rainey: Mann, Thomas []. Translated by Rainey, Lawrence Scott: — Bloomsbury Publishing. UNC Press Books. Publications of the English Goethe Society. Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer. Toledo Blade. Archived from the original on 19 January Retrieved 17 December Stars and Stripes. Archived from the original on 20 December Diaries — Kurzke, Hermann; Wilson, Leslie Thomas Mann.

Life as a Work of Art. A Biography. I was just a mother photographing her children as they were growing up. I was exploring different subjects with them. Mann's fourth book, Still Time , published in , was based on the catalogue of a traveling exhibition that included more than 20 years of her photography. The 60 images included more photographs of her children, but also earlier landscapes with color and abstract photographs.

In the mids, Mann began photographing landscapes on wet plate collodion 8x10 inch glass negatives, and used the same year-old 8x10 format bellows view camera that she had used for all the previous bodies of work. Many of these large 40"x50" black-and-white and manipulated prints were taken using the 19th century "wet plate" process, or collodion , in which glass plates are coated with collodion, dipped in silver nitrate , and exposed while still wet.

This gave the photographs what the New York Times called "a swirling, ethereal image with a center of preternatural clarity", [ 28 ] and showed many flaws and artifacts, some from the process and some introduced by Mann. Mann has been the subject of two film documentaries. The first, Blood Ties In her New York Times review of the film, Ginia Bellafante wrote, "It is one of the most exquisitely intimate portraits not only of an artist's process, but also of a marriage and a life, to appear on television in recent memory.

Mann uses antique view cameras from the early s. These cameras have wooden frames, accordion-like bellows and long lenses made out of brass, now held together by tape that has mold growing inside. This sort of camera, when used with vintage lenses, softens the light. A self-portrait which also included her two daughters was featured on the September 9, cover of The New York Times Magazine, for a theme issue on "Women Looking at Women".

The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound , after decomposition, along with photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal forensic anthropology facility known as the ' body farm '. The 'body farm' was another series in addition to those about her family that was controversial. The second part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed in a shootout with police.

The third part is a study of the grounds of Antietam , the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War. The fourth part is a study of close-up faces of her children. Mann's sixth book, Deep South , published in , with 65 black-and-white images, includes landscapes taken from to using both conventional 8x10 film and wet plate collodion.

These photographs have been described as "haunted landscapes of the south, battlefields, decaying mansion, kudzu shrouded landscapes and the site where Emmett Till was murdered". Mann's seventh book, Proud Flesh , published in , is a study taken over six years of the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband Larry Mann. Mann photographed her husband using the collodion wet plate process [ 31 ] As she notes, "The results of this rare reversal of photographic roles are candid, extraordinarily wrenching and touchingly frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moment.

Her pictures are imbued with an amazing degree of soul. Its unifying theme is the body, with its vagaries of illnesses and death. In May Mann delivered the three-day Massey Lecture Series at Harvard , [ 36 ] speaking about how her extended family influenced her work. Her memoir Hold Still arose as a companion to the lecture. The two photographers discussed their respective careers, particularly the ways in which photographing personal lives became a source of professional controversy.

Stamps lecture series. Mann's ninth book, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs , released May 12, , is a melding of a memoir of her youth, an examination of some major influences of her life, and reflections on how photography shapes one's view of the world. It is augmented with numerous photographs, letters, and other memorabilia.

She singles out her "near-feral" childhood and her subsequent introduction to photography at Putney, her relationship to her husband of 40 years and his parents' mysterious death, and her maternal Welsh relative's nostalgia for land, background to her own love for her land in the Shenandoah Valley, as some of her important influences. She also assesses Gee-Gee, a black woman who was like a parent to her, who opened Mann's eyes to race relations and exploitation; her relationship with local artist Cy Twombly , and her father's genteel southern legacy and his eventual death.

She ponders the relationship Robert S. Munger , her great-grandfather and southern industrialist, had with his workers. The New York Times described it as "an instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last 50 years". It is an insider's photographic view of Twombly's studio in Lexington. It was published concurrently with an exhibit of color and black-and-white photographs at the Gagosian Gallery.

It shows the overflow of Twombly's general modus operandi: the leftovers, smears, and stains, or, as critic Simon Schama said in his essay at the start of the book, "an absence turned into a presence". Mann's eleventh book, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings , written by Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel, is a large pages compendium of works spanning 40 years, with photographs by Mann.

This was the first major survey of the artist's work to travel internationally. In her recent projects, Mann has started exploring the issues of race and legacy of slavery that were a central theme of her memoir Hold Still. They include a series of portraits of black men, all made during one-hour sessions in the studio with models not previously known to her.

Jones 's use of the Walt Whitman poem "Poem of the Body" in his art. She "borrowed the idea, using the poem as a template for [her] own exploration". Several pictures from this body of work were highlighted in Aperture Foundation magazine in the summer of , [ 46 ] and they also appeared in A Thousand Crossings. The Crossings book and exhibit introduced a series of photographs of African-American historic churches photographed on expired film.

Mann also published a series of tintype photographs of a swamp that was known to have served as refuge for escaped slaves. Some critics believe that she is working deeply through of the legacy of white violence in the South, while others have voiced concern that Mann's work at times repeats rather than critiques tropes of white domination and violence in the region.

In , a group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth , Diaries of Home , raised controversy from local elected officials. The background is dominated by the thick forest that surrounds the river, and the reflection of the trees in the still water. As the title tells, this image is significant in Mann's oeuvre as it marks the last time her oldest child agreed to model nude for her.

In the early s, various political groups and the media were concerned about growing incidences of child pornography in society. It was in this context that Immediate Family was "delegitimized", in an act of what the sociologist Jeff Ferrell called "cultural criminalization". Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, for instance, protested that "selling photographs of children in their nakedness for profit is an exploitation of the parental role".

Other members of the public wrote to Mann suggesting that her photographs would lead to her children suffering psychological trauma, and would likely result in at least one pedophile moving to Lexington and prowl the town's streets. Mann responded, "I didn't expect the controversy over the pictures of my children. I was just a mother photographing her children as they were growing up.

I was exploring different subjects with them". Nevertheless, she treated the complaints seriously and took her children to a psychologist who concluded that they were "well-adjusted and self-assured" , and even considered postponing the publication of the Immediate Family to "when the kids won't be living in the same bodies [and when they'll] have matured and they'll understand the implications of the pictures".

But it was her children who insisted that the images should be made public. As her husband Larry noted, "The kids are aware how the pictures are received in the art world and they're proud of them". Mann did ask each child sift through the collection and remove those they were unhappy with, but the images they removed were, not the naked images, but those, in Mann's words, that made them look "like dorks".

In this sepia-tinted photograph, a tree stands front and center frame, with a broad, horizontal gash across its trunk. In the unfocused background, we see a wire fence, behind which lies a misty field, and still further back, a line of trees. Photographer Thomas Peck argues that in order to appreciate this image we need to consider the way in which the trees "have a unique, historical resonance, wrapped up with the difficult history of slavery that casts its shadow through the centuries to the modern day.

And Mann's tree is scarred, torn, violated. The rupture in the bark is a wound. It has festered, calcified into the tree. The tree grows on, the wound remains, visible and not yet truly healed. It represents a terrible history of this locality which has yet to be fully absorbed and absolved". For this series the image formed part of her Deep South book published in , Mann used the wet plate collodion process, which involves coating glass plates with a nitrocellulose solution, and dipping them in silver nitrate immediately before exposure so that they are wet at the moment of exposure.

This was the dominant photographic process used in civil war battlefield photography and often results in surface distortions and blemishes. Mann embraced these flaws as they lend the images a sense of mystery, moodiness, and melancholy. As curator and art critic Lyle Rexer put it, the Deep South photographs are "swirling, ethereal" images "with a center of preternatural clarity".

This image comes from Mann's series Body Farm and was taken at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility in Knoxville which was founded in and is known colloquially as the "Body Farm". The 2. Mann was fascinated to discover that the "Body Farm" existed. She observed, "There was something matter-of-fact about the way those bodies were laid out and how they were treated.

I mean, they were a scientific experiment and very quickly I grew to see them that way, in the same way that the graduate students were working with them. So that was one of the shocking things". Many works from this series also appeared in Mann's book, What Remains , which includes images that focus on the theme of death more broadly. Mann first began capturing images of death around the year , when she documented the decaying corpse of her pet greyhound, Eva.

She explains, "I have had a fascination with death that I think might be considered genetic [ Mann's images amount, however, to much more than a morbid fascination with death and decay. As writer Blake Morrison explains, "[Mann's point is that] death is not an end, that nature goes on doing its work long after the body has become a carapace". In the artist's own words, "Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.

Says Mann, "If there's any time when you're vulnerable, it's when you're dead. In life, those people had pride and privacy. I felt sorry for them. I thought if they knew I was taking photos, without them having a chance to comb their hair or put their teeth in, they'd die of shame. So I expected critics to ask: is this right? However, as she explains, "I discovered that some of the corpses were street people who hadn't signed releases.

And of course even those who did sign probably thought the photos would be scientific, not artsy-fartsy. So though I was given a free hand - 'Go on,' they said, when a fresh batch arrived, 'unzip the body bags and get them out' - I decided to keep the subjects anonymous. I didn't want to aestheticize them, either. It was important to treat them with respect".

This photograph shows the back of the artist's husband, Larry, from the waist-up, with his right hand resting on his left shoulder. He leans back against a wet window, causing the image to be slightly out-of-focus. The image belongs to Mann's series Proud Flesh It focuses on Larry who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy a deterioration of muscle mass in Mann spent the next six years documenting his body and his battle with the disease.

The title of the series Proud Flesh refers to the medical term in the equestrian world for the intermediate layer of unsightly flesh that develops over a horse's wound in the healing process, before the final scar tissue is formed. Furthermore, the individual image titles in the book, reference a sweep of literary sources, from classical mythology and the Bible, to works of modern writers such as T.

Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Eudora Welty. Curator Max Weintraub notes that "Shooting in close-up as he posed nude in her largely unadorned and rustic studio, the resulting images depict fragments of Larry's naked body - and often little more - in a shallow pictorial space. The simplicity of Mann's images is balanced by her use of the wet-plate process, which adds a warm tone to the surface of the photographs and leaves a distinctive layer of residual marks, pocks and other imperfections, all of which introduce an air of delicacy and ephemerality to these nude studies.

Mann observed that it is rare for female artists to focus on the nude male form: "In taking these pictures, I joined the thinly populated group of women who have looked unflinchingly at men, and who frequently have been punished for doing so [ The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected".

Sally Turner Munger was the youngest of three children born to Robert Munger, a doctor who drove around Lexington, Virginia in his Aston Martin luxury British sports car making house calls and delivering babies, and, Elizabeth Evans Munger, a bookstore manager at Washington and Lee University. Sally's primary maternal figure, however, was her nanny, an African-American woman named Virginia Carter who took day-to-day care of Sally and her siblings.

Combined with his newfound political allegiances, Mann's stature as a representative cultural figure—he received the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt in —made him an inevitable target of retribution when the Nazis came to power in His books, along with those of other political undesirables, were burned in public on 10 May. After five years in Switzerland, Mann went to the United States in , where he remained until , when he returned to Zurich, where he died and is buried.

His last major novel, Dr. As with Germany as a whole, the pact ends in madness and ruin. One of the ironies of Mann's life and intellectual career is that, by renouncing Germany—or at least that version of Germany that physically ceased to exist in and committed moral suicide by implementing the Holocaust—he thereby managed to save some part of it for the future.

It was with no small justification that, when Mann arrived in New York in , a reporter asked him whether he found his exile difficult to bear, he replied with a mixture of defiance and pride: "Where I am, there is Germany" Harpprecht, p. If there was a "good" or even "better" Germany, Thomas Mann did indeed embody it. See also Germany.

Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art. A Biography. Translated by Leslie Willson. Princeton, N. Prater, Donald. Thomas Mann: A Life. Oxford, U. Winston, Richard.