Photographs

Sam Manno’s photographs lead us into worlds that we’d rather not acknowledge.  We visit the woods behind the subdivision, where the hands of teenage boys with BB guns gingerly examine the birds, they have just shot.  We suddenly discover the rendering plant around the corner from the shopping center.  This is the place where the bodies of livestock and roadkill are hauled for processing, a place filled with dead animals that were perhaps loved, perhaps neglected, or simply unknown.  The secrecy of these unceremonious graveyards is kept by our unconsciousness, not by their invisibility.

The photographs remind us that these worlds are one with and right next to the one we more comfortably inhabit.  The images ask the question – is there beauty and meaning only in what we find inspiring, pleasing, or entertaining?  In this way, as a viewer, I am invited into the denied and avoided, the unconscious and split-off, what I’d rather not see and am still fascinated by.  This is a place occupied by dead horses, dead birds, and boys whose eyes cannot make sense of what they have done.  We wander into the underworld, a place of shadow and nightmare, like voyeurs in our own backyard.

Sam Manno’s work does bring a “dark eye” and a “careful precision” to the nearby woods and the rendering plant behind Wal-Mart, and our brightness is, indeed, made unsure.

-Linda Kastelowitz September 23, 2006