i was way hasty about sally mann's memoir. due i admit to that unspeakable monster, envy. sorry sally. by the end of the book i was intrigued.

i thought her preoccupation with death was kind of distant and aesthetic, which it kind of is, which allows her to go to the Body Farm, where people donate their bodies to decay and be consumed in a natural setting. she gets right in, handling them and intimately photographing them, not aestheticizing, but seeing in a way that is exceeding rare. then i saw her drawings about her father. almost before her preoccupation with death she must have felt his. he was country doctor, and an ever aspiring artist, and he was distant. she made photos just like the ones he made before she was born, which she found only after his death. the drawings are preoccupied with his death, from the time she was a toddler, and show a macabre and gleeful ambivalence. she says she was afraid of his death, but it struck me the drawings almost wished it.  although she says the death drawings were an innoculation against his death, "certainly not" a wish for it. this is the crux, the most interesting part of a long inter-generational life saga, and i think her ambivalence continues. i applaud her work in excavation and elucidation, and i think art means approaching the inapproachable obliquely at times, like her photos do, seeing with a dark lens, an ancient lens sometimes, a phantom lens that views the periphery. where the spirits lay in wait.