SALLY MANN

Mann explored various genres as she was maturing in the 1970s: she produced landscapes and architectural photography, and she blended still life with elements of portraiture. But she truly found her métier with her second publication, a study of girlhood entitled At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (Aperture, 1988). Between 1984 and 1994 she worked on the series Immediate Family (Aperture, 1992), which focuses on her three children, who were then all under the age of ten. While the series touches on ordinary moments in their daily lives—playing, sleeping, eating—it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality. In Proud Flesh (Aperture and Gagosian Gallery, 2009), Mann turned the camera to her husband, Larry. Shot over a six-year period, this series of candid and frank portraits reverses traditional gender roles, capturing a male subject in moments of intimate vulnerability.

Mann has produced two major series of landscapes: Deep South (Bullfinch Press, 2005) and Mother Land (Edwynn Houk Gallery, 1997). In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), she assembled a five-part study of mortality, ranging from pictures of the decomposing body of her beloved greyhound to photographs of the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She has often experimented with colour photography, but she has remained most interested in black-and-white, especially photography’s antique technologies. She has long used an 8 x 10 bellows camera, and has explored platinum and bromoil printing processes. In the mid-1990s she began using the wet-plate collodion process to produce pictures that almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting, and sculpture.

A Guggenheim fellow and a three–time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named ‘America’s Best Photographer’ by Time magazine in 2001. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2007), which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008. Hold Still: A Memoir in Pictures (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2016 Hold Still won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Mann has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings was presented at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 2018 (travelling to the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, through 2020); the exhibition features some 115 photographs, many of which have not been exhibited or published previously. Mann’s photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia.

Courtesy Gagosian