Sally Mann, Remembered Light, Untitled (Painting and Sculptures), 2006, gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 inches (40.6 × 50.8 cm), edition of 3 © Sally Mann
Sally Mann Listed Exhibitions (Selected) (109 Kb)
Sally Mann Bibliography (113 Kb)
Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia. She has always remained close to her roots. She has photographed in the American South since the 1970s, producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. She is perhaps best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband, and for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South. Her work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always been influential, and since her the time of her first solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in 1977, has attracted a wide audience.
Sally 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 metier with her second publication, a study of girlhood entitled At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). Between 1984 and 1994, she worked on the series, Immediate Family (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 (2009), Mann turns the camera to her husband, Larry. Shot over a six year period, this series of candid and frank portraits reverse traditional gender roles, capturing a male subject moments of intimate vulnerability.
Mann has produced two major series of landscapes: Deep South (Bullfinch Press, 2005) and Mother Land. In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), she assembled a five-part study of mortality, one which ranges from pictures of the decomposing body of her beloved greyhound, to the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She has often experimented with color photography, but she has remained most interested in black and white, especially photography’s antique technology. She has long used an 8×10 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 which almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting, and sculpture.
Guggenheim fellow, and a three–time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Sally 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. Her most recent book, 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.
She has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia.