Sally Mann

Sally Mann is recognized for her photographs of intimate and familiar subjects, portraying them as both sublime and disquieting. Her works delve into the intricacies of familial relationships, social realities, and the flow of time, revealing tensions between nature, history, and memory.

Biography of Sally Mann

Hailing from Lexington, Virginia, Mann embarked on her photographic journey in the late 1960s. She honed her skills at renowned institutions such as the Ansel Adams Gallery’s Yosemite Workshops in Yosemite National Park, California, as well as the Putney School and Bennington College, located in Vermont. In 1974, she earned a BA from Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, followed by an MA in creative writing the subsequent year.

While many photographers were creating large-scale color prints, Mann took a different path, delving into photography's history. She explored the visual and metaphorical possibilities of using nineteenth-century technologies. Mann has consistently used an 8 x 10 bellows camera and has experimented with platinum, bromoil, and wet-plate collodion processes for creating her prints.

Mann's first solo museum exhibition was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1977. This exhibition featured "The Lewis Law Portfolio" (1974–76), a collection of black-and-white photographs representing some of her earliest explorations into the inherent abstract beauty found in everyday life.

In the early 1980s, Mann published two books: "Second Sight" and "At Twelve," with the latter focusing on young girls at the threshold of womanhood. Between 1984 and 1994, she worked on the series "Family Pictures," centered around her three children. These works captured ordinary moments like playing, sleeping, and eating, while also addressing larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality and motherhood.

From the late 1990s to the 2000s, Mann focused on her connection with the American South, capturing images in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana for her "Deep South" series (2005). She also photographed Civil War battlefields for "Last Measure" (2000). Her enduring interest in themes of death, time, and decay is apparent in "What Remains" (Bullfinch Press, 2003), a five-part exploration of mortality. This series includes images ranging from the decomposing body of Mann's cherished greyhound to photographs of the location where an armed fugitive took his life on her property.

From 1999 to 2012, Mann photographed Cy Twombly's warmly lit studio in Lexington, documenting the moments she shared with him there and the remnants of his artistic life.  

In 2003, Mann turned her lens to document the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband, Larry. These candid and honest portraits, which later formed the "Proud Flesh" series (2009), draw parallels to classical sculpture while capturing a male figure in moments of intimate vulnerability.

Mann's most recent extensive project, "A Thousand Crossings," delves deeper into the intricate cultural identity of the American South, as well as her personal relationship with her native region — a place steeped in literary and artistic legacies but also shadowed by its history. Starting her work on this project in 2006, the exhibition premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 2018. Since then, it has traveled widely across the United States and internationally, including stops in Paris.

Three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was honored as "America's Best Photographer" by Time magazine in 2001. In 2021, she received the Prix Pictet and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. Mann has been the focus of two documentaries: "Blood Ties" (1994), an Academy Award-nominated film, and "What Remains" (2006), which premiered at Sundance and earned a 2008 Emmy nomination for Best Documentary.