Photographs depict intimate scenes every mother would recognise

Candy Cigarette, photograph by Sally Mann, part of the Mixed Up Childhood show at the New Gallery.

As Mixed-Up Childhood's Turner Prize-winning art star Grayson Perry has said, as soon as sexuality and childhood are uttered in the same sentence, you can be sure of media controversy.

Although American photographer Sally Mann's candid images of her family are the opposite of Perry's provocatively confused fantasy scenes, she has had more than her share of unwarranted attention.

Featured in her book Immediate Family, these pictures were taken of Mann's children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia in the late 1980s. They show them posing, often naked or semi-dressed, and have generated criticisms of being exploitative but are mostly praised for their honesty.

"Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen," Mann says in the book's introduction. "I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river."

Mann was so cautious to ensure her pictures wouldn't get her in trouble that she showed them to an FBI agent before they were exhibited.

Although these were now taken a long time ago and her children have since grown up, they still generate interest and an HBO documentary scheduled to air later this year in the United States features an outraged televangelist.

In these images, nudity demonstrates the child's unabashed innocence, their ease in familial surroundings, and their trust of the photographer who is not an intruder in these private family moments.

Most importantly, this is a mother's view of her children who are genuinely at play; boys come home with bloody noses, girls get scratched by the dog, ice blocks drip everywhere and kids like to pretend they're grown-ups, resulting in suggestive poses with candy cigarettes.

Virginia has always been home for Mann and she has depicted her children enjoying the same relaxed rural upbringing she experienced.

In 1997, after 12 years of photographing her family, Mann began to focus on the southern woodland landscapes Immediate Family was captured in. Her project What Remains surveys former Civil War sites, exploring the way death can affect our perception of the landscape.

There is a sumptuous, dreamy quality to Mann's images. Bodies glow with a milky white lustre from their shadowy settings and trees shimmer in ghostly light.

This can be attributed to her mastery of traditional techniques. She uses a century-old 8x10 camera, collodion wet-plate glass negatives (a process favoured by 19th-century landscape photographers) and a special formula of her own to varnish the final prints, all contributing to a romantic, painterly look.

One series from her What Remains project features decaying bodies left outdoors, part of a University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility.

Considering the examples of people being imprisoned in America for photographing children and corpses, Mann has been lucky. There is an element of privacy in her work that challenges what is sacred and what should be shown publicly.

In the final series of What Remains Mann returns to images of her children. These are images of life and death; the cycle of mortality over which nature presides.

Exhibition

* What: Sally Mann in Mixed-Up Childhood
* Where and When: New Gallery, to May 29