The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-13)

E6 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022

It’s intimate. Mann’s 8-inch-by-

10-inch view camera and rich

printing capture the richly varie-

gated tones of textured shirt,

striped cushions, boa, hair and

skin. Shadow encroaches on the

picture’s lower half. The cap-

tured moment appears sponta-

neous, but 8-by-10 view cameras

are cumbersome. They make ac-

tual spontaneity all but impossi-

ble. So Mann and her children

usually collaborated on pictures,

staging fictions that suggest

deeper meanings. (Mann, in this

case, bit her own arm — but that’s

okay: artists are allowed to in-

vent!)

Art

BY SEBASTIAN SMEE

S

ally Mann has taken no

end of indelible photo-

graphs — her strike rate

is enviable. But what I

love about “Jessie Bites,”

from her great book “Immediate

Family,” is the window it opens

onto things that are ... whatever

is the opposite of “indelible.” I’m

not seeing “delible” in the dic-

tionary. So let’s say “erasable,”

“temporary,” “transient.”

Registering the transience of

things — our own childhood, the

childhoods of our children, the

seasons, life itself — can be

painful. The consolation, we’re

often told, is that pain, too, can

be transient. Like a bite mark.

Mann’s photograph, taken in

1985, shows one of her three

children, Jessie. The girl’s relaxed

left arm is looped under the arm

of an adult, Mann herself, in a

manner evoking the fond, unself-

conscious dependence — the de-

pendability — of family.

That impression is complicat-

ed, however, by the detail that

gives the work its title: The

adult’s arm is imprinted with a

bite mark. Both the proximity of

Jessie and the extraordinary, ag-

grieved expression on her face

(what a scowl! Naomi Watts,

Kristen Stewart, eat your hearts

out) suggest that she was respon-

sible.

Her expression is not just

fierce. It’s watchful, suspicious.

Devastating as it is, I imagine it

as fleeting. That’s the way kids’

moods are, right? Three minutes

after the moment of the photo-

graph, Jessie, whose smudged

and (thankfully) far from indeli-

ble body paint and feather boa

suggest a great day of play —

could be once again running

wild, or else sleeping like a fallen

warrior.

The photograph is gorgeous.

The human subjects in “Jessie

Bites” are so close they are

cropped, the camera pressed

close to their skin. It is this that

makes the bite marks, when you

see them, briefly shocking, al-

most as if someone had sunk

their teeth into the photograph

itself.

The picture reminds me, in

fact, of an encaustic painting by

Jasper Johns called “Painting Bit-

ten by a Man.” It’s just a small,

gray, pasty thing with a bite taken

out of it, leaving a shallow cavity

striped by teeth marks. I don’t

know quite what connection my

mind is making. But both works

leave me wondering: Why would

anyone bite a thing that is clearly

not food?

Pure, animal aggression? The

urge to make an impression? To

see what it feels like? To test out

authority? Maybe all those

things. To children, parents are,

in a sense, like paintings seen up

close. So close that their con-

tours, their meanings are impos-

sible to discern.

A child’s parents or guardians

are fonts of love and protection.

They’re also tyrannical, self-ap-

pointed authorities and sources

of incredible frustration. Chil-

dren must do battle with them

constantly as they undergo the

necessary process of growing up

and growing away.

Mann’s photo is simple. Apart

from being beautiful (“The world

is beautiful before it is true,”

wrote the philosopher Gaston

Bachelard), it reminds us that we

are profoundly ambivalent crea-

tures. “The people you love the

most,” as Edgar Degas once jotted

in his journal, “are the people you

could hate the most.” All the

emotion attached to this ambiva-

lence — the love, the pain, the

humor, the all-of-it — is fleeting,

like a bite mark. But it’s also

enduring, like a photograph.

The profundity of parenthood, captured in an image with real teeth

SALLY MANN/GAGOSIAN

Sally Mann (b. 1951)

Jessie Bites, 1985

On view at the Guggenheim

A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee’s favorite works

in permanent collections across the United States

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