Mary Manning, His Estate, 2022

Mary Manning: Hi, I'm Mary Manning. 

The title, His Estate, was kind of making light of a somewhat heavy circumstance. These are two photographs that my dad, Mike Manning, took in the probably late seventies. There's not a date on them, but I presume thinking about around the time that he got this camera would've been '79, possibly early eighties.

He passed away of COVID in 2020. So I made this picture not long after he died in 2020, and it's just a picture of his two pictures.

My dad was an artist, but also a really complicated guy. And we sort of shared the same appreciation for nature, but we never really got a chance to high five about that. And so His Estate was sort of a joke of like, this is my inheritance, whether it's his eye, if you want to read it that way, or if it’s these actual photographs.

When I made it, I thought more about just what it took for this ex-marine with a new Canon, living out in the country, trying to have some serenity and taking pictures of flowers and some sort of golden hour sunshine. It's just sort of a tribute to that act of wanting to record. 

It's always a little daring or something, to be so sincere in a really cynical time. But I feel that way about making pictures, in analog form. It feels like you're making an object that goes through this alchemic process, so you're really invested in whether or not you hit the button to make a picture.