While film has experienced a renaissance in recent years — largely driven by younger photographers who appreciate its retro charm — it is an expensive endeavor.
So expensive in fact that famed large format photographer Sally Mann, who shot to fame for her film photographs of her children, says she has started shooting on digital cameras — and in color.
“I’m just loving it,” Mann tells the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio program. “It’s so easy. Color is so easy, and so much fun.”
“It makes such a difference. It’s so time-consuming and laborious to work with an 8×10 view, and the film is now so expensive,” Mann continues.
“I hate spending that much money on each shot; you’re always second-guessing yourself, you’re saying, ‘Is that good enough? Is that really worth $12?’”
Mann contrasts film with digital, where “you just shoot and if you don’t like it, boom, gone, off your computer.”
Of course Mann hasn’t just gone for a standard digital camera. While she didn’t reveal which body she is using, the glass is a “1940s old Leica lens.”
“I’m shooting down in the Mississippi Delta where you can’t take a bad picture because of the gorgeous lyricism and dream-like quality of the light down there,” Mann tells Desert Island Discs. “I have this funky old lens and it doesn’t handle light very well, so there’s this glow to everything.”
As Digital Camera World notes, Mann still carries around her 8×10 Deardorff sheet-film view camera in the car. But the enthusiasm for her new digital setup shines through in Desert Island Discs, a program where guests pick the music they would like to bring with them if they were stranded on an imaginary desert island.
Seized Photographs
Last year, Mann hit the headlines when police seized her work from an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, after a complaint was made about her photos.
The photos were from her most famous project Immediate Family, a collection of intimate photos of her children as they grew up on a rural farm in Lexington, Virginia.
“It was shocking,” Mann says of the seizure. “It was really like déjà vu. How can this be happening now? No art has ever been seized like that; this is a first. And that alone is shocking. I haven’t spoken very much about it, but if not now, when? We really need to stand up as artists.”
Mann says she dislikes the “controversial” tag that is often attached to her name and doesn’t want to just be known for the photos of her family.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.