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Sally Mann's photographic series Immediate Family, composed of photographs of her three children taken between 1984 and 1991 and published in 1992, drew tremendous popular and critical attention. The radically diverse criticisms and interpretations of Immediate Family range from charges of the aestheticization of child abuse, accusations of parental neglect, and exploitation on Mann's part to, conversely, praise for Mann's unabashed exposition of maternal desire and of the sexual self-awareness of children. The latter position appreciatively views Mann's project as a subversion of culturally prescribed idealizations of the innocence of both the mother and the child through a more `accurate' depiction of both. However, very few responses on either side of the debate have much to say about Mann's photographs as photographs and, instead, tend to focus on the `realities' that the photographs ostensibly reflect, be they corrupt or liberated realities.(1) For example, Janet Malcolm argues that the accusations leveled against Mann stem from the unwillingness of many spectators to acknowledge the difficult truths with which they are confronted in the photographs.(2) When Malcolm asserts that Mann "stalks and waits for, and sometimes stages, the moments that other parents and photographers may prefer not to see," she articulates a common theme in the writing on Mann. Namely, a slippage occurs between the roles of photographer and mother that then results in documentary or diaristic readings of the photographs.(3) More theoretical writings on Mann's work tend to arrive at similar conclusions by interpreting Immediate Family through psychoanalytic models of subject formation within the framework of the mother-child relationship.(4) This is not to suggest that the slippage between the roles of mother and professional photographer is not one that Mann self-consciously courts in this series. On the contrary, it is precisely because these photographs negotiate between the expectations, practices, and conventions of the family album photograph and those of the fine art photograph that one must keep in view how these two categories play into and against one another in Mann's series, rather than basing one's interpretation on an elision of the two.
Before I discuss Mann's photographs in greater detail, I want to consider two theoretical frameworks that elaborate on the relationship between image, referent, and spectator in photography and that thereby illuminate various productive tensions...