A Day With The Ladies

How do you feel about this photograph? What does it tell you about the girl? Let me know in the comment section.

Yesterday, I met up with some of my OC friends, Nicole, Kerri, and Julia for a play and an early dinner afterward.

Nicole was thoughtful enough to invite us to see the play about Sally Mann at the playhouse where she works in Rhode Island.

Sally Mann, a famous and controversial photographer of many different subjects, has been more famously criticized for nude photos of her own children with critics citing they push the boundaries of child pornography.

Sally Mann's provocative choice of subject is based upon the everyday life she and her family lived on their expansive and isolated land. Her children lived a more feral life, as she did during her own childhood, with her children often running around nude (as mine have and still often do).

So, to many who are used to living a more structured lifestyle, Sally's subject matter may seem taboo.

What is taboo to certain people in our society isn't necessarily taboo for others. So, essentially, who is to dictate what is acceptable and what isn't.

During the Talk Back after the play, Nicole brought up an excellent point that while the photographer has her own innocent point of view of her subjects, it's the audience who brings their own experience to the photo thereby marking it as innocent or controversial.

I personally love the freedom of her children. There is no pretense in their actions and they aren't harnessed by society's boundaries. Sally Mann's photos are snapshots of her children's natural, innocent tendencies. Children have no preconceived notions of what is acceptable behavior until it is pressed upon them by adults.

So, this is my intellectual take on a really interesting woman.

I so badly wanted to participate in the Talk Back discussion (btw, we were the youngest audience members there amongst very distiguished looking "early bird specialists") and throw the word "taboo" into my comment. I felt like I could've contributed something intellectual if I did that, LOL. Instead, I sat in a murky haze caused by a double dose of cough medicine I took so I wouldn't hack all over the girls and the elderly folk.

Afterward, we walked around the corner to a little pub where, amongst other "provocative" subject matter, we talked about how hairy/hairless our significant others were. The intellectual flow went rolling right along......