Sally Mann (born Sally Turner Munger; May 1, 1951) is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, husband, and rural landscapes, as well as self-portraits.
Early life and education Born on May 1, 1951, in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest; his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large-format cameras today. Mann began to photograph when she was sixteen.
Most of her photographs and writings are tied to Lexington, Virginia. Mann graduated from The Putney School in 1969, and attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She earned a BA summa cum laude from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and an MA in creative writing in 1975.
She took up photography at Putney where she has said her motive was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend. Mann has never had any formal training in photography and she "never read[s] about photography".
Early career After graduation from Hollins College, Mann worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee University. In the mid-1970s she photographed the construction of its new law school building, the Lewis Hall (now the Sydney Lewis Hall). These photographs were the basis of her first solo exhibition in late 1977 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The Corcoran Gallery of Art published a catalogue of Mann's images titled "The Lewis Law Portfolio". Some of the images had a surreal aspect; they were also included as part of her first book, Second Sight, published in 1984.
While Mann explored a variety of genres as she was maturing in the 1970s, she truly found her trade with her book, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (Aperture, 1988).
In 1995, she was featured in an issue of Aperture: "On Location with: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Graciela Iturbide, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, Andres Serrano, Clarissa Sligh" which was illustrated with photographs.
At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women
Her second collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, published in 1988, stimulated minor controversy. The images "captured the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls [and the] expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images". In the preface to the book, author Ann Beattie wrote "when a girl is twelve years old, she often wants – or says she wants – less involvement with adults. ... [It is] a time in which the girls yearn for freedom and adults feel their own grip on things becoming a little tenuous, as they realize that they have to let their children go."
Beattie says that Mann's photographs do not "glamorize the world, but they don't make it into something more unpleasant than it is, either". The girls photographed in this series are shown "vulnerable in their youthfulness" but Mann focuses on the strength that the girls possess.
Referring to "Untitled", an image from the book shown here, Mann says that the young girl was extremely reluctant to stand closer to her mother's boyfriend. Mann said that she thought it was strange because "it was their peculiar familiarity that had provoked this photograph in the first place". Mann did not want to crop out the girl's elbow but the girl refused to move in closer. According to Mann, several months later, the girl's mother shot her boyfriend in the face with a .22. In court the mother "testified that while she worked nights at a local truck stop he was 'at home partying and harassing my daughter. Mann said "the child put it to me somewhat more directly". Mann says that she now looks at this photograph with "a jaggy chill of realization".
Immediate Family and controversy
Mann became widely known for Immediate Family, her third collection, first exhibited in 1990 by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City and published as a monograph in 1992. In a cover story for The New York Times Magazine, Richard B. Woodward wrote that "probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world". The article detailed a federal prosecutor having informed Mann that "no fewer than eight pictures she had chosen for the traveling exhibition ["Immediate Family"] could subject her to arrest."
Immediate Family appeared at a time when politicians were cracking down on even the suspicion of child pornography to appeal to their constituents, forcing artists to justify their work and leading many to self-censor. According to writer Bruce Handy, the Christian right conflated naturalistic nudes of children by Mann and Jock Sturges with sexualized images by photographers such as David Hamilton.
Mann considered these photographs to be "natural through the eyes of a mother since she has seen her children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry and even naked". Deborah Chambers, in her work on family photo albums, reflects on their idyllic nature but also argues they rarely convey the actual experience of the family. Mann's work takes these idyllic photos meant for semi-private consumption and brings them to the public sphere. By working collaboratively with her children, Mann uses these idealized family photos to create a narrative from her children's perspectives. Critics agreed, saying her "vision in large measure [is] accurate and a welcome corrective to familiar notions of youth as a time of unalloyed sweetness and innocence". They said that the book "created a place that looked like Eden, then cast upon it the subdued and shifting light of nostalgia, sexuality, and death".
When Time magazine named her "America's Best Photographer" in 2001, it wrote:
Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play. What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events. No other collection of family photographs is remotely like it, in both its naked candor and the fervor of its maternal curiosity and care.
Dr. Aaron Esman, a child psychiatrist at the Payne Whitney Clinic, believes that Mann is serious about her work and that she has "no intention to jeopardize her children or use them for pornographic images". He says that the nude photographs don't appear to be erotically stimulating to anyone but a "case-hardened pedophile or a rather dogmatic religious fundamentalist". Mann stated, "I didn't expect the controversy over the pictures of my children. I was just a mother photographing her children as they were growing up. I was exploring different subjects with them."
Later career
Mann's fourth book, Still Time, published in 1994, was based on the catalogue of a traveling exhibition that included more than 20 years of her photography. The 60 images included more photographs of her children but also earlier landscapes with color and abstract photographs.
In the mid-1990s, Mann began photographing landscapes on wet plate collodion 8x10 inch glass negatives and used the same 100-year-old 8x10 format bellows view camera that she had used for all the previous bodies of work. These landscapes were first seen in Still Time, and later featured in two shows presented by the Edwynn Houk Gallery in NYC: Sally Mann – Mother Land: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia in 1997, and then in Deep South: Landscapes of Louisiana and Mississippi in 1999. Many of these large (40"x50") black-and-white and manipulated prints were taken using the 19th century "wet plate" process, or collodion, in which glass plates are coated with collodion, dipped in silver nitrate, and exposed while still wet. This gave the photographs what the New York Times called "a swirling, ethereal image with a center of preternatural clarity", and showed many flaws and artifacts, some from the process and some introduced by Mann.
Mann has been the subject of two film documentaries. The first, Blood Ties (1994), was directed by Steve Cantor and Peter Spirer. It debuted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. The second, What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (2005), was also directed by Cantor. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008. In her New York Times review of the film, Ginia Bellafante wrote, "It is one of the most exquisitely intimate portraits not only of an artist's process, but also of a marriage and a life, to appear on television in recent memory."
Mann uses antique view cameras from the early 1890s. These cameras have wooden frames, accordion-like bellows and long lenses made out of brass, now held together by tape that has mold growing inside. This sort of camera, when used with vintage lenses, softens the light. A self-portrait (which also included her two daughters) was featured on the September 9, 2001 cover of The New York Times Magazine, for a theme issue on "Women Looking at Women".
Mann's fifth book, What Remains, published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. The book is broken up into four sections: Matter; Lent, December 8, 2000; Antietam; and What Remains. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound, after decomposition, along with photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal forensic anthropology facility (known as the "body farm"). The "body farm" was another series (in addition to those about her family) that was controversial. The second part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed in a shootout with police. The third part is a study of the grounds of Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War. The fourth part is a study of close-up faces of her children.
Mann's sixth book, Deep South, published in 2005, with 65 black-and-white images, includes landscapes taken from 1992 to 2004 using both conventional 8x10 film and wet plate collodion. These photographs have been described as "haunted landscapes of the South, battlefields, decaying mansion, kudzu-shrouded landscapes, and the site where Emmett Till was murdered". Newsweek picked it as their book choice for the holiday season, saying that Mann "walks right up to every Southern stereotype in the book and subtly demolishes each in its turn by creating indelibly disturbing images that hover somewhere between document and dream".
Mann's seventh book, Proud Flesh, published in 2009, is a study taken over six years of the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband Larry Mann. Mann photographed her husband using the collodion wet plate process. As she notes, "The results of this rare reversal of photographic roles are candid, extraordinarily wrenching, and touchingly frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moment." The project was displayed in Gagosian Gallery in October 2009.