Web Encyclopedia News Blogs Forums

Sally Mann

Sally Mann (born May 1, 1951,Lexington, Virginia) is an American photographer.

Mann attended The Putney School, Bennington College and Friends World College, and earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) and an M.A. in writing. PBS PBS art:21 - Art in the 21st Century

Career

After graduation Mann became a staff photographer for Washington and Lee University in her hometown. Her mother ran the University's book store. Her father was the primary physician in town.

In the mid-1970s her boss, Frank Parsons, encouraged her to photograph the construction of Washington and Lee's new law school, Lewis Hall. Mann's first one-woman exhibition came in late 1977 at the Corcoran Galley of Art in Washington, D.C., with surrealistic images of the construction of a new law building at Washington and Lee.Archives / Corcoran Gallery of Art

Mann's work has stimulated controversy beginning with her second published collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). To critics, these 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." , but for many the photographs portray a child's innocence.

Her next collection was Immediate Family in 1992. These images gained notoriety for including 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 protesters considered 'child pornography.'" Her photographs continue to be shown in and collected by most major American art galleries and museums.

A recent collection of work, entitled What Remains (2005), features dream or nightmare-like images made with the antiquated glass plate process collodion, 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 the images appear to have been highly manipulated - scratched and otherwise maimed for artistic intent - however this is just a result of the imperfect collodion process. Mann has admitted to not wanting to perfect this process, as she feels the unintentional streaks and scratches add something to her photographs.

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 black-and-white photos are shot with an 8x10 large format camera. Mann lives in Lexington with her husband and three children, Jessie, Emmett, and Virginia.

Recognition

Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Corcoran Gallery of Art, among many others.

Time magazine named Mann its "Photographer of the Year" for 2001. Photos she took have appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine twice: first, a picture of her three children for a 1992 feature on her "disturbing work"The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann; and again in 2001, with a self-portrait (which also included her two daughters) for a theme issue on "women looking at women."

She is the subject of a documentary, What Remains which covers her entire artistic career. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was featured at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, among many others.