First distributed in 1992, Immediate Family by Sally Mann is 10 years in length arrangement comprising of cozy photos of her three youngsters: Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia. Taken at their mid year home in Lexington, Virginia, the work is a blend of authentic perception and created fiction – nature and stratagem. As a look into the multifaceted nature of adolescence and family, Mann centers around the emotional idea of the photo and its division from the real world. Mann regularly recorded the darker side of youth to bring the watcher into their own feelings of trepidation. Capturing her youngsters bare, harmed, or in other helpless positions: Mann started in 1984 with the photo Damaged Child, demonstrating Jessie with her face swollen from bug nibbles. She later followed to record such cozy minutes as Emmett’s bleeding nose, Virginia’s wet bed in The Wet Bed, and Jessie’s moving bare on a table in The Perfect Tomato. During such, Mann makes evident the division she had made among herself and her kids when set on rival sides of the camera, as to recognize a qualification among past and future – reality and image.

Barthes plots in Camera Lucida that a private life is as yet conceivable inside the parameters of obtrusiveness made when a camera is available. He contends that the move of making a photo shapes an item out of the subject, through deification as an observer for death. He composes that the way toward shooting is to encounter a flashing demise of the subject where they remain briefly deified, accordingly the subsequent subject made past the picture exists in a modified structure, exclusively developed by the demonstration of capturing. The picture delivered no longer stays indexical of the subject, rather the photo turns into a bogus reality.

The picture is contained inside the stillness and quietness of the edge, as contextualized in Sally Mann’s work Immediate Family. This article will investigate through basic examination: the photos, pundits reaction and the equals each make to Roland Barthes hypothesis of level demise nitty gritty in Camera Lucida, with further examination into Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Ariella Azoulay’s Photography: The Ontological Question.