Sally Mann

(American, born 1951)

Sally Mann is an American photographer known for her black-and-white portraits of her family and documentation of the landscape of the American South. Since the 1970s, she produced a series of photographic portraits, landscapes, and still life’s and is best known for her intimate portraits of her family, including her three young children and husband. Similarly to David Hamilton, Mann has caused controversy with her nude photographs causing repeated outcries and calls for censorship. The complexity of her photographs, including her most famous series Immediate Family (1984–1994), which depicts her three children, who were then all under the age of 10, explores the time between childhood and adolescence. “As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs,” she reflected. “And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.” Born Sally Turner Munger on May 1, 1951 in Lexington, VA, she received her BA and later her MA from Hollins College in Virginia before working as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University during the mid-1970s. Throughout the following decade, the artist’s career grew as she began producing books of photography, including At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), which captures developing identities of 12-year-old-girls from her hometown and includes her notable work, Candy Cigarette (1989). From 1999 until his death in 2011, Mann photographed Cy Twombly’s studio in her hometown of Lexington, VA. Using large-format cameras to capture fine details, Mann’s images appear antique due to her interest in early photographic technology, as well as revisiting the 19th-century process of wet collodion. Her work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mann currently lives and works in Lexington, VA.