Photographs by American photographer Sally Mann were removed from a group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, according to the Dallas Express. On January 6th, the Texan newspaper reported that the works in question have been “secured as potential evidence” for a pending investigation. The newspaper had previously reported on complaints by public officials regarding the content of the photographs, which the publication described as “child pornography.”
The controversy involves works by Mann featured in the museum’s group exhibition “Diaries of Home.” Mann is known for her photographs of the American South and intimate portraits of her family life. Beginning in 1984, Mann often photographed her young children outdoors in rural Virginia, where she herself was raised; in some of these images, the children are nude. The images are devoid of any sexual content.
In response to the reporting, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth released the following statement: “An inquiry has been made concerning four artworks in the temporary exhibition ‘Diaries of Home.’ These have been widely published and exhibited for more than 30 years in leading cultural institutions across the country and around the world.”
While the museum’s statement only mentions four artworks, Glasstire reported that five of Mann’s photographs—Popsicle Drips (1985), The Perfect Tomato (1990), The Wet Bed (1987), Another Cracker, and Cereus—have been removed from the exhibition.
“Diaries of Home” showcases the work of 13 women and nonbinary artists, including Nan Goldin and Carrie Mae Weems, who explore “multilayered concepts of family, community, and home,” according to a description on the museum’s website. The description notes that the exhibition “features mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.”
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has condemned the police’s reported seizure of Mann’s photographs. In a statement released on January 9th, the organization criticized the notion that such images constitute child sexual abuse material, arguing that this perspective “degrades the seriousness of real incidents of child abuse” and furthers “the perverse and troubling perception that all images of naked children are inherently sexual, thereby reinforcing the very sexualization of children that critics purport to oppose.” The NCAC has urged Texas authorities to halt the ongoing investigation and return the artworks to the museum.
Mann previously faced controversy when photos of her nude children were exhibited at New York’s Houk Friedman Gallery and published in the monograph Immediate Family in 1992. A cover story in The New York Times Magazine later that year drew attention to the work and questioned its ethics. In 1997, in response to a critical essay by the writer Mary Gordon in Salmagundi magazine, Mann defended her work, writing, “It is a banal point that no artist can predict how each image will be received by each viewer, and that what is devoid of erotic meaning to one person is the stuff of another’s wildest fantasies.”
Mann further reflected on the episode in a 2015 essay for The New York Times Magazine, adapted from her memoir, Hold Still: A Memoir With Photographs. There, she wrote: “I was blindsided by the controversy. It occasionally felt as though my soul had been exposed to critics who took pleasure in poking it with a stick.”
