New Work: Sally Mann

Sally Mann is a native Virginian best known for her endless photographs of her three children in the early 1990s. I love her series, Deep South in which she photographs Southern landscapes using damaged lenses and a giant camera that requires her to use her hand as a shutter. The work was processed in the dark room using obscure chemicals and glass slide negatives. The results are incredible, photographs marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus.

Fortunately for me, Sally Mann will have a show on November 13th at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts here in Richmond! She will be there to talk about her new work, The Flesh and The Spirit that focuses on the body. You can get tickets here.

Sweet, Sweet, Daguerreotypes

History of Photography was undoubtedly one of my favorite classes I took at SCAD. The class introduced me to Daguerreotypes—one of the first forms of photography. The street scene below is not only beautiful, it's also the first photograph of a person! (Look closely he's standing next to a bench getting his shoes polished) The Library of Congress has a ton of Daguerreotypes for free to download here. I had way too much fun searching through them all!

Russian Empire Photographs 1905-1915

Words can not describe how utterly obsessed I am with the Library of Congress Online Prints & Photographs Catalog. I especially enjoy the photographs of the Russian Empire taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii in the early 1900s. Color photography had not yet been invented, so Prokudin-Gorskii photographed each subject in black and white on a glass plate negative, using red, green and blue filters. He displayed his imagery using a light-projection system involving the same three colored filters. The Library of Congress has combined his black and white negatives and converted them into color. There are over 2,500 of these lovely images on their site and I'm having a hard time deciding which are my favorite. Any of these photographs would look fantastic hanging on a wall or as room decor.