"Memory is the primary Instrument, The Inexhaustible Nutrient Source": Remediations of Literary Romanticism in Sally Man's Family Photographs

It has been argued that Romantic images of childhood have disappeared from late twentieth-century culture, and that the innocent child of nature has made way for the "knowing child." However, if we go beyond pictorial traditions and include literary Romanticism, a caesura in the cultural construction of childhood becomes questionable. A close reading of Sally Mann's Immediate Family, an album of art photographs that have been proposed as crucial evidence of a break in the aesthetics and poetics of childhood, shows that the continuities between Mann's family photographs and the Romantic paradigm vastly outnumber the discontinuities.