Sally Mann: American Photographer #4

4. The Contradiction In The South

As Sally Mann became an adult, she grappled with the fundamental contradiction of the South and tried to come to terms with it. This problem was that even though the white upper class wanted to keep Black and white people separate in public places, they had very close family relationships in private. She wondered if the love and feelings between people who were forcefully kept apart could be genuine and free from guilt or disgust.

According to Mann, the answer to this problem was the fact that people in the South didn’t question this contradiction. They were blind to it, and they didn’t talk about it. Mann asked, “What were we thinking? Why didn’t we ever ask questions? The secret is our blindness and our silence”.

Mann started looking at herself and trying to understand her behavior and feelings in the early 2000s. She wanted to figure out how the issues of race, the history of Virginia, and the way society is organized in that state have influenced not only the physical environment but also her own experiences while growing up. She wanted to address and deal with all the different ways that people from different races were separated or divided from each other, even if these divisions were not always obvious.

She had an interest in tracing the “streams of blood” of African Americans that had occurred in this land. She also wanted to tell the stories of their bravery and struggles when they escaped from slavery and…