Close to the Bone
Sally Mann in Houston, Texas
The beautiful part about making work that’s rooted in your soul is that you don’t have to do a damn thing. The magic just happens. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Houston, Texas, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings exposes the pride, struggles and losses that saturate the fabric of rural communities beyond the Mason-Dixon line.
We see the sooty, weathered knees of a coal miner skulk past the lens, attached to a man whose hardships you could never imagine. His fight is written in the sinews of his legs, still standing in spite of his entire life–a life which likely gives him immense pride.
Mann catches the frail and fearless innocence of a sheltered child on Easter Sunday before her grandfather swoops in put an end to the nonsense, his salty brow folding over itself like a slice of ham.
Mann renders the open hills and fog into water-colored histories, the morals of which are carved on Virginia’s muddy riverbanks, trees, and Baptist churches. In a time when the divides between red and blue communities are clearly marked in MAGA hats and Bernie stickers, the morals and the clichés are always the same: We all return to the dirt, and someone will always come in last.
At least for a few split seconds, these people came first–either in front of Mann’s lens, or each time a new viewer took the time to consider the burden of survival on the bent backs of America’s stereotyped southerners. To Mann and to her subjects, these photographs are so much more than can be absorbed in one viewing–they are the names tattooed on the knobby shoulders of barbed-wire fathers and mothers, all strength and utility without any flesh for comfort.
They live close to the bone.
They are the proof of history’s readiness and willingness to repeat itself, and each shot is a reminder to wake the hell up and pay attention before it does.
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings is on view through May 27, 2019.
