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It can’t be easy to have a play written about you.
Then again, photographer Sally Mann has been through a few firestorms in her career – most notably the uproar around “Immediate Family,” her book of nude photos of her young children, published in 1992, which was met with cries of “Pornography!” and made her one of the top selling fine-art photographers of her time.
That controversy, and all the still-raw feelings around it, are at the heart of “Some Things Are Private,” the new play at Trinity Repertory Company created by Deborah Salem Smith and Laura Kepley, who developed Trinity’s acclaimed 2006 theatrical war docudrama, “Boots on the Ground.”
Mann faced outrage head on when “Immediate Family” was published. The book features photographs – some spontaneous and some staged, some disturbing and all haunting – of her children. They grew up in the secluded patch of Virginia forest and farmland where Mann herself had come of age. Just as their mother had skinny-dipped when she was a kid, Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia Mann hung out, quite comfortably, in the nude. In the Mann household, taking pictures was a family activity; the kids often collaborated with their mom to devise beautiful or interesting photographs.
In “Some Things Are Private,” playwright Smith and director Kepley explore how Mann’s photos continue to unsettle viewers, and how when viewers are uncomfortable, they may search for answers from the artist.
Check it out here.