ART REVIEW

Land Surveyor: Sally Mann’s landscape photographs lack the psychological tension of her well-known portraits of her children. Of course, it’s difficult to imagine any picture of an unpopulated expanse of forest or farmland that is as charged as the artist’s stunningly intimate depictions of her kids as sexual creatures, both frighteningly like adults yet clearly different from us.

Titled “Mother Land,” two new series of large black-and-white prints at Gagosian Gallery present shadow-shrouded views of the Southern countryside. Made with antique lenses in rural Georgia and Virginia, Mann’s 15 handsomely framed pictures are sentimental journeys into an imagined past suffused with the sweet melancholy that often accompanies fond recollections of broken dreams.

For the most part, the images made in Virginia are infinitely more haunting and beautiful than those made in Georgia. Significantly smaller, more tightly cropped and printed in rich, saturated blacks that transform the landscape into a lush underworld, Mann’s Virginia pictures focus on trees, fields and streams, all lit from above by a strange source of light that is as fragile as a candle’s flame.

In contrast, the Georgia photographs include a country lane, a stone wall, a pile of logs, a weathered barn, a brick fort and an old wagon. Numerous fallen trees, vines and rolling fields are also depicted.

These tell-tale signs of human life are not as distracting as the cracks, bubbles and other blemishes that mar the surfaces of Mann’s big prints. Dark, arched shadows fill the top corners of these pictures, creating the impression that you’re looking down long tunnels at photos that have been overexposed or have faded with age.

Watery stains and discolorations likewise emphasize that these images were made with antique lenses. Although such irregularities are meant to give Mann’s art the hallowed patina of age, they actually detract from her works.

Overused by contemporary photographers who want to endow their images with deep meaning, such gestures come off as being coy, overwrought and empty. Lost is the matter-of-fact magic of Mann’s Virginia pictures, not to mention those of her kids.

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* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271- 9400, through Oct. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.