The Cost of Performing Childhood for Your Parent’s Art

The Cost of Performing Childhood for Your Parent’s Art

They were pictures of ordinary life as seldom seen — wet beds and nosebleeds, naked children playing in the curve of a dark river, their bodies as slim and white as tapers. Sally Mann’s photographs, published in her collection “Immediate Family,” in 1992, brought her instant celebrity and censure. The undeniable innuendo in her images of innocence (Baby Virginia peering at us through heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses) caused conservative and femini…