The Sally Mann Lecture
Sorry it has taken me awhile to get back on how the lecture was.
After a great introduction by Ted Orland (an old friend of Sally's and the author of Art & Fear, a book I own and which I started but was too scared to read through - ha!) which included how he met her (at the Ansel Adams workshop thirty years ago or so) and an ad that she took out in her local newspaper where she was having a studio sale selling her prints from something like $2-$25, Sally came on.
She presented a somewhat chronological slide lecture of her life & photography. She showed her first picture ( nudes on a lawn) which almost got her kicked out of college to the Southern landscapes. She's an incredibly intelligent woman, very humble and extremely articulate about WHY she photographs, HOW she photographs. Oh, and she has a phenomenal vocabulary!
Anyways, she peppered her lecture with tons of humorous anectodes, technical info (always shoots wide open, 8x10 toyo with 300mm lens, preferred developer is Dektol, etc.) and why she shoots what she does: "This is the last picture that I took of the three kids actually. What happened at this point was that the landscapes sort of ambushed the whole family series. It got to the point where I would find a background and as almost an afterthought, I would put the child in it. I guess I got involved, more and more, in doing just landscape photographs. And I started with Virginia."
I went away from the lecture really inspired and with a better understanding of why she makes the aesthetic decisions she does and how photography really dominates her life. I can say more about the lecture if anyone cares or is a fellow Mann-fan....