Yet sitting in Room 25, watching Indianna bouncing on the hotel bed, it is hard to see her as an exploited or troubled child. She’s one of the happiest, most delightful five-year-olds I’ve ever met. Later in the day I’ll find myself confused, even disturbed, by other parts of the pageant experience, but not now.

This little girl is fine.Įshun is an unlikely pageant mother. She has dreadlocks and works in child protection. Marley’s father Edward Eshun is from Ghana, and he and Raelene also care for his daughter Naa, 9, competing today. Should Naa’s hair be up, down, or halfway up and down? Naa wants to model: “She’s a very humble young girl, but get her on the runway and she just turns into Naomi Campbell,” says Raelene Eshun.Įdward, a drummer and dancer, sits quietly in the corner, offering advice when asked. And then Naa wanted her sister Marley to join her. Like most mothers here, Eshun found a supportive, tight-knit community in the pageant world. And Eshun is particularly impressed that the Follow Your Dreams pageants do not score girls on facial beauty. “With the American TV shows, you think it is all about fake eyelashes and that sort of stuff. Yes, there are mums who may go a bit overboard, but that’s okay, that’s their choice. My girls do fine without all that extra stuff.”

It’s after 3pm now, nearly crowning time. The girls climb back into their formal wear for the ceremony. The young ones play as the older girls sweep by in long gowns, some with sashes and tiaras. This reissue of Immediate Family has been printed using new scans and separations from Mann’s original prints, which were taken with an 8 x 10-inch view camera, rendering them with a freshness and sumptuousness true to the original edition.The experience seems completely outside a five-year-old’s normal life. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made: impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in these astonishing photographs. With sublime dignity, acute wit and feral grace, Sally Mann’s pictures explore the eternal struggle between the child’s simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy-the holding on and the breaking away. Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland summer home in Virginia, Sally Mann’s extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children reveal truths that embody the individuality of her own family yet ultimately take on a universal quality. First published in 1992, Immediate Family has been lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time, and among the most influential.

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