The Verbal Language of the Visual Arts: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Discourse Around Sally Mann’s Photography

The study of art discourse is a critical aspect of the art world, serving various purposes such as supporting, describing, and educating. The discourses surrounding visual arts form the basis of art theories and the concepts through which art is evaluated. The objective of this study is to investigate the discursive universe of Sally Mann’s photography. To achieve such a goal, a Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (Lexical MDA) was carried out. Lexical MDA is a statistical approach used to identify the underlying discourses in texts. It was used to analyze a corpus of 555 texts about the photographer and her work written in a period of over 40 years. The corpus of texts was cleaned up, lemmatized, and tagged for part-of-speech with the TreeTagger, a tool for annotating text with part-of-speech and lemma information. A script was used to identify the most prominent lemmas, count their occurrences, and norm them. The normed counts were then analyzed using a factorial analysis, resulting in seven lexical dimensions. It was found that the discourses underlying Mann’s work are centered on the North American South, the fascination with mortality, and family relations. This study contributes to the use of empirical, corpus-based linguistic studies as a tool to investigate art and its discourse. By using this approach, researchers can gain insight into the discourse surrounding art and how artists express themselves through their work.