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The photographer Sally Mann (1951-) has been working in her Southern hometown for a long time, producing various types of works, such as still life, portrait, and landscape. She established her reputation in her early period by family portraits, and she shifted the focus of her photography in the late 1990s. Published in 2005, Deep South is a photographic collection with almost 10 years of landscape works, which includes Mother Land (1996), Deep South (1998), and Last Measure (2003). In a glimpse, these three series are all blurred black-and-white photographs, evoking an archaic atmosphere of 19th-century photography. To discuss them further, these three series actually reflect different styles and aesthetics in the photographer’s career stages, probing into layers of Southern stories.
In this thesis, through an analysis of styles and Southern photographic context, I will discuss the complex relationship between photographs and texts in Deep South. The first chapter begins with the formation of Mann’s styles and techniques, tracing back how Mann gradually turned to 19th century’s photography techniques in these landscape series. Furthermore, I will discuss the revival of old-fashioned style trends similar to Deep South, such as Pictorialism in the late 19th century, and the contemporary antiquarian photographers. In the second chapter, in order to discuss the Southern spirit in Deep South, I will compare Southern photographers’ works with Deep South, and the Southerner writers’ poetry which was written in accordance with Mann’s landscape photographs. Through the photographic collection Deep South and the memoir Hold Still, Mann successfully interweaved the regional stories and her personal family memories in Deep South, creating contemporary Southern landscape myths. The third chapter mainly focuses on the Southern myths lying behind landscapes in Deep South, which was written and being interpreted continuously for over 20 years since it was published. Southern stories and Mann’s memoir Hold Still are the primary references in this study, in order to unveil layers of meanings in Mann’s landscape photographs. | en_US |