Immediate family

More about the book

This is a book of remarkable images - intense and intimate - recording the photographer's children as they explore their woodland home in Virginia. The striking photographs show the ambiguities and dramas of family life, hauntingly evoking the mysteries of childhood. All of the photographs in Immediate Familywere taken with an 8" x 10" view camera. As Sally Mann herself says in the introduction: 'These are photographs of my children ... many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river.' The result is a book that is ethereal, tender and sometimes eerily disquieting: a distinctly human work - at once personal and universal - that is magnetically seductive.