Rendering "Render"

Sally Mann, Self-Portrait, 1974

In the summer of 2010, I had the amazing opportunity to guest lecture at Worcester College at Oxford University in the United Kingdom as part Georgia Tech’s Study Abroad Program. On my off day, I went with fellow teachers Karen Head and Colin Potts to see the Sally Mann exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

It was a retrospective of Mann’s most famous work: the controversial photographs of her children, the haunted Civil War battlefields and the corpses deteriorating at the “body farm” at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center in Knoxville. Although I had seen many of the photographs before, something about seeing them in such large scale in the hushed rooms of that gallery revealed something about my own art. It was, literally, like a flashbulb going off in my mind.

Read the full essay at the Sibling Rivalry Press blog.