Sally Mann

Sally Mann (born 1951 in Lexington, Virginia) is an American photographer.

She was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She attended The Putney School, Bennington College and Friends World College, and received a BA, Summa Cum Laude from Hollins College in 1974 as well as an MA in writing. She still lives in Lexington with her husband and three children, Jessie, Emmet, and Virginia.

Although most of Mann's work has been controversial, she gained notoriety with her second published collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). According to critics, those portraits "captured the confusing emotions and developing sexual identities of girls at that transitional age, one foot in childhood and one foot in the adult world."

Her next collection was the controversial Immediate Family 1992. It gained notoriety for its nude photographs of her own children (of which she took a couple of pictures of her son nude with his penis showing). Some critics called her work child pornography, but such condemnations, still considered controversial, have not hurt her career. Her photographs continue to appear in most major American art museums.

DazeReader states that "In the late 1990s, Christian conservatives in the US protested bookstores which stocked books by David Hamilton, Sally Mann and Jock Sturges, whose work the protestors considered 'child pornography.'"

TIME magazine named Mann their "Photographer of the Year" for 2001.

A recent collection of work, entitled What Remains (2003) features dream- or nightmare-like images made with the antiquated glass plate process of rustic scenes in the pictorialist style, some including dead and decaying human bodies. Another series in the work features images of the Antietam battlefield. The book closes with a series of images of Mann's children. Many of images have been highly manipulated - scratched and otherwise maimed for artistic intent.

Mann's most recent works have been landscapes or "land portraits" of rural areas of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. Most of it is untitled, and can be found in a collection called Deep South. These images were photographed using damaged lenses and cameras, creating a ghostlike effect and producing images full of light leaks.

Mann's large black-and-white prints are all shot with an 8x10 (large-format) camera.