Sally Mann, photographer

I recently saw a show of verite photographers (my term; I can't even remember what the museum called them, or how they justified grouping them together. Basically, the photographers all take photos of their friends and family, but not like you and I do; they keep the ugly shots). It included Nan Goldin and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia. Also Tina Barney and Larry Sultan.

All had some interesting and arresting shots, but most of them became overwhelming in abundance, and they have an underlying bleakness with which I am all too familiar. I wasn't in the mood, I guess.

Then there's Sally. Sally's photos of her three kids and her rural Virginia surroundings have one thing the other photos don't: hope for the future. There's a tremendous determination in Mann's photos, an insistence on looking at the world around you, not as you want it to be, but as it is, and in admitting that it won't last. I get the feeling from her photos that life is brutal and gorgeous and worth fighting for, and that you'd better be ready to scrap. There's an unflinching tenderness in these photos that I've only seen so powerfully presented in Steinbeck novels, maybe, or in Emmylou Harris's voice.

It's like they're saying, "Keep trying. It's worth it."