Remembered Light
Sally Mann writes intimately of her relationship with Cy Twombly and the photographs she made of his studio before Twombly's death in 2011.
The older you get as an artist the higher the risks of success. The more work that surrounds a career, the more likely that the entrapment of past production will constrict future work, tying us ever more tightly to our style, our themes, our aesthetic past.
For example, when I was just starting out as an artist, I’d take pictures of anything, just for the sheer joy of seeing what it looked like as a photograph. Over time I began to take pictures of subjects that I had an opinion about, or of subjects that illuminated an intellectual concept that interested me. I don’t mean I was illustrating a polemic; I always defer to the imperatives of beauty, lyricism and the universal resonance of felicitous proportion. But, all the same, much of my work is in service to a concept: the nature o...
