Yesterday, we posted a series of photos by photographer Robert Frank. Within the series of photos, we mistakenly featured a photo of a young girl, about fourteen, holding a cigarette. This famous photo, named “Candy Cigarette,” belongs to Sally Mann. (Thank you, for those of you who caught it.)
So here we are, yet again (although even more stripped to the boney skeleton and unlike anything else to this day) staring into the eyes of the lonely, confused America in the 1980s. Mann features her own children, caught between moments of childhood play and unnerving curiosity.
Naive and wide eyed, naked and virgin, Mann’s photos received a lot of critique, as well as a lot of credit. No one had ever exaggerated the intimacy of a mother’s relationship to her children, nor, the children’s relationship to the world, open, daring, and raw. Her photos were considered pornography. To us, some of the most beautiful, true, evocative, and influential photos of all time.
