Sunday, January 04, 2026

About Sally Mann


I’ve been grumbling for some time over the tendency of BBC Radio 4 presenters and guests to assume that listeners will need every cultural reference glossed and clarified before they can take it on. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear the photographer Sally Mann on Desert Island Discs this morning, blithely dropping into the conversation Proust (also her book choice) and Nabokov, Cy Twombly and Kandinsky, all so fast that Lauren Laverne didn’t have chance to explain, before selecting eight discs that bounced between Keith Jarrett, Vivaldi and Sylvester.

And then she almost ruined things by saying “the proof is in the pudding” but I forgive her.

PS: Not that anyone really cares, though. As the writer Joel Morris observed, also this morning:

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