Officials have seized multiple photos from a museum in Texas after complaints over the images’ depictions of children, including images by photographer Sally Mann. Earlier this week, a warrant was issued and executed for multiple photographs on display at a group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The images are part of a multi-artist exhibition called Diaries of Home, which features artwork by women and nonbinary artists.
Texas officials called for an investigation into some of the images on display back in December; a warrant was then issued earlier this month. The photographs in question have been removed from the museum as potential evidence, according to local news publication The Dallas Express.
The Diaries of Home exhibition included several pieces of Mann’s artwork, including Popsicle Drips (1985), which depicts a nude male child with liquid on his body, and The Perfect Tomato (1990), which shows a nude female child standing tip-toe on a picnic table. The museum's website and a sign at the entry warn viewers that the collection “contains mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.”
However, the images – which were taken in the late Eighties and early Nineties – also drew criticism when the photographs were initially displayed in the traveling exhibition Immediate Family and published in a book by the same name. In 1992, Mann was told by a federal prosecutor that at least 8 of her images could subject her to arrest.
More than ten years later, Mann wrote an article in the New York Times detailing the family pictures and the controversy that ensued. The images were taken over the course of a decade on the family’s farm in Virginia, which Mann said was so remote that it didn’t have electricity or running water.
“Although barely a quarter of them depicted a nude child, I was unfailingly described as the woman who made pictures of her naked kids, an assertion that inflamed my critics, many of whom had never actually seen the work,” she wrote.
In the article, Mann said that she involved her children in the process of taking and editing the photos, giving each child the photos of themselves and asking them to remove any that they did not want to share.
“It’s hard to know just where to draw that stomach-roiling line, especially in cases when the subject is willing to give so much,” she wrote. “But how can they be so willing? Is it fearlessness or naïveté? Those people who are unafraid to show themselves to the camera disarm me with the purity and innocence of their openness.”
In 1990, Mann explained that a critic took an image of her daughter and republished it without her permission with black bars over the girl's face and genitals. The girl responded with a letter to the critic in which she wrote, “Dear Sir, I don’t like the way you crossed me out.”
Immediate Family isn’t Mann’s only series that photographs the human body with a jarring openness that Reynolds Price of Time once described as “an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.” Her portfolio of work also includes photographs of a nude man with late-onset muscular dystrophy (Proud Flesh) and photographs of human remains being studied at the University of Tennessee (Body Farm).
“To be able to take my pictures,” Mann wrote, “I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.”
In a description of the Diaries of Home exhibition, the museum writes, “The artists in Diaries of Home use the vernacular of documentary photography, which creates an immediate sense of familiarity and understanding. Yet, the works subvert the implied truthfulness of the imagery by exploring the medium’s inherent subjectivity through enticing fiction and drama, or by magnifying everyday affairs.”
The Diaries of Home exhibition began in November and is expected to continue through February 02.
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