Editorial rigor is something that is so important with making art.
You can make all the art you want, but if you dilute it by putting out a bunch of crappy art, it’ll take history forever to sort through it all and find the little gems. Better that you sort through it. You don’t want to leave it to the paws of history.
Could you say something more about the importance of the South to your work and your career?
Actually, it was probably a drag on my career, if you think about it. It’s not the place to be from, if you have ambitions to be an artist.
Yet look at you.
And look at all the others. Look at Jasper Johns and look at Rauschenberg and look at Cy Twombly and look at the writers, the dozens and dozens of great writers. But it’s a hard hurdle to get over, I think, being Appalachian or being Southern.
You never made an effort to move to New York. That wasn’t something you felt was necessary. If you think about Jasper, and if you think about Bob and Twombly, they all left the South.
But Eggleston didn’t. He used the South as his subject matter. It’s a foreign country for most people, so it’s exotic in that way, and it offers a lot of inspiration.
Have you ever thought of doing something completely different?
Well, I am doing digital color. That’s about as different as you can get. Bless their hearts, I asked Leica to give me one of those digital cameras that I can put my 1946 lens on. It’s a Leica lens, but it has lots of anomalies and it handles the light differently than a modern lens. And I just love it. And they gave me a camera, which was extremely sweet of them, and I’m having a blast.
Mann with her Leica.
Photo: Maude Schuyler Clay
Does it opens doors for you?
Yeah—I think in a completely different way. And there’s a freedom to it that you don’t have with film, because film is expensive. It’s like $12 a sheet. But digital, it’s free.
Did the iPhone do anything for you?
I use it, but people are always surprised—they say, “Don’t you take tons of pictures of your grandchildren?” And I think I might’ve taken one.