Lee Mary Manning

Photographer Lee Mary Manning (b. 1972, Alton, Illinois) models a method of close and care-filled looking in carefully arranged juxtapositions of 35mm analog prints.

Taking familiar objects and scenes as their subject matter, Manning’s photos picture people, nature, the street, and everything in between.

Conceptualizing “paying attention as a practice of being alive,” the artist insists on the importance and meaning of quiet moments and humdrum things that might initially seem unremarkable. For Manning, photography is an exercise in recording and collecting—often prints are paired with saved mementos such as insect parts, a restaurant napkin, or a plastic bag. Sharing this diaristic archive of their lived experience pivots on a sincere relationship of trust with the viewer that they too will be interested in noticing the commonplace. Even as the works function as a record, they don’t document the artist’s experiences in a particularly legible way. Manning’s photos flirt with a kind of poetic illegibility—everyday life, abstracted.

To make their works, Manning uses basic point and shoot film cameras and works largely with mini-lab prints that they can hold and move around next to each other, finding felicitous formal congruences between the images. This sequencing practice began with their website Unchanging Window, a pre-Instagram, pre-Tumblr online forum that began in 2006 as a way to share photos and cultural recommendations with friends. Despite their online origins, the works resist crisp, digitized image culture. Instead, Manning takes an unprecious approach. The images are never retouched or cropped, occasionally they show the trace of fuzz on the lens or are slightly out of focus, and prints can be covered in fingerprints. While Manning is slow and intentional about looking and choosing what to capture, the physical act of taking the photo is often improvised and on-the-move—and the motion of the body of the photographer is often legible through the blur of the print. Primarily influenced by dance, film, and poetry, Manning often draws from the formal methods of these media. The shaped juxtapositions of their multi-photograph compositions are akin to the rhythmic quality of poetic stanzas or the evocative cuts of experimental film. The works exemplifyboth photography and looking as acts of care, tenderly drawing our attention to modest but remarkable moments.

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