Sally Mann
Sally Mann (born May 1, 1951 in Lexington, Virginia) is an American photographer.
Mann was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and attended The Putney School, Bennington College and Friends World College. Mann received a B.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and then took an M.A. in Writing. Mann still lives in Lexington with her husband and three children, Jessie, Emmet, and Virginia.
Much of Mann's work has been controversial. She first 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 Immediate Family 1992. It gained notoriety for its nude photographs of her own children. Some critics called her work 'child pornography'. 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.
The condemnations of her work, still considered controversial by some, have not hurt her career. Her photographs continue to be shown in and to be collected by most major American art galleries and museums. Her daughter Jessie Mann has spoken and written about the experience of being photographed (see her article Self Possessed in the Summer 2006 issue of Aperture, a follow-up to the interview she gave Aperture magazine in Winter 2001. In both she describes in both articles the experience of modelling for her mother and the effect on her life over time.)
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 same body of 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. The body of work represented in What Remains is the subject of a feature documentary film about Mann, that debuted at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival (titled What Remains, 80 mins., dir. Steven Cantor).
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.
External links
- Link to some pictures from Immediate Family.
- 21st Photography Platinum Series by Sally Mann
- PBS art:21 - Art in the 21st Century Sally Mann