Sally Mann
Encyclopedia
Sally Mann is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.

Early life and education

Born in Lexington, Virginia
Lexington, Virginia
Lexington is an independent city within the confines of Rockbridge County in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The population was 7,042 in 2010. Lexington is about 55 minutes east of the West Virginia border and is about 50 miles north of Roanoke, Virginia. It was first settled in 1777.It is home to...

, Mann was the third of three children and the only daughter. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner
General practitioner
A general practitioner is a medical practitioner who treats acute and chronic illnesses and provides preventive care and health education for all ages and both sexes. They have particular skills in treating people with multiple health issues and comorbidities...

, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University
Washington and Lee University
Washington and Lee University is a private liberal arts college in Lexington, Virginia, United States.The classical school from which Washington and Lee descended was established in 1749 as Augusta Academy, about north of its present location. In 1776 it was renamed Liberty Hall in a burst of...

 in Lexington. Mann graduated from The Putney School
The Putney School
The Putney School is an independent high school in Putney, Vermont. It was founded in 1935 by Carmelita Hinton. It is a co-educational, college-preparatory boarding school, with a day-student component, located outside of Brattleboro, Vermont. Emily Jones is the director...

 in 1969, and attended Bennington College
Bennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont, USA. The college was founded in 1932 as a women's college and became co-educational in 1969.-History:-Early years:...

 and Friends World College. She earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University
Hollins University
Hollins University is a four-year institution of higher education, a private university located on a campus on the border of Roanoke County, Virginia and Botetourt County, Virginia...

) in 1974 and a MA
Master of Arts
A Master of Arts is a high academic degree offered at many universities in Europe and the United States.A Master of Arts, Magister Artium, or Magister in Artibus may also refer to:...

 in creative writing in 1975.
She took up photography at Putney, where, she claims, her motive was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend. She made her photographic debut at Putney, with an image of a nude classmate. Her interest in photography was promoted by her father. His 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today.

Early career

After graduation, Mann worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee University. In the mid 1970s she photographed the construction of their new Law School building, the Lewis Hall (now the Sydney Lewis Hall), leading to her first one-woman exhibition in late 1977 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...

 in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 Those surrealistic images were subsequently included as part of her first book, Second Sight, published in 1984.

Her second collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, published in 1988, stimulated 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.”

Mann is perhaps best known for Immediate Family, her third collection, published in 1992. The NY Times said, “Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world.” The book consists of 65 black-and-white photographs of her three children, all under the age of 10. Many of the pictures were taken at the family's remote summer cabin along the river, where the children played and swam in the nude. Many explore typical childhood themes (skinny dipping, reading the funnies, dressing up, vamping, napping, playing board games) but others touch on darker themes such as insecurity, loneliness, injury, sexuality and death. The controversy on its release was intense, including accusations of child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...

 (both in America and abroad) and of contrived fiction with constructed tableaux. One image of her 4-year-old daughter (Virginia at 4) was censored by the Wall Street Journal with black bars over her eyes, nipples and pubic area. Mann herself 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.” 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,” and 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
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

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.


The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

considered it "one of the great photograph books of our time."

Her 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.

Later career

In the mid 1990s, Mann began photographing landscapes on wet plate collodion 8x10 glass negatives (see below), and again used the same 100-year-old 8 x 10 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
Collodion
Collodion is a flammable, syrupy solution of pyroxylin in ether and alcohol. There are two basic types; flexible and non-flexible. The flexible type is often used as a surgical dressing or to hold dressings in place. When painted on the skin, collodion dries to form a flexible cellulose film...

, in which glass plates are coated with collodion, dipped in silver nitrate
Silver nitrate
Silver nitrate is an inorganic compound with chemical formula . This compound is a versatile precursor to many other silver compounds, such as those used in photography. It is far less sensitive to light than the halides...

, 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’s fifth book, What Remains, published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Museum
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...

 in Washington, DC and is in five parts. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound
Greyhound
The Greyhound is a breed of sighthound that has been primarily bred for coursing game and racing, and the breed has also recently seen a resurgence in its popularity as a pedigree show dog and family pet. It is a gentle and intelligent breed...

, after decomposition. The second part has the photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal Forensic Anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

 Facility (known as the ‘body farm’). The third part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed. The fourth part is a study of the grounds of Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

. The last part is a study of close-ups of the faces of her children. Thus, this study of mortality, decay and death ends with hope and love.

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
Kudzu
Kudzu is a plant in the genus Pueraria in the pea family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae. It is a climbing, coiling, and trailing vine native to southern Japan and southeast China. Its name comes from the Japanese name for the plant, . It is a weed that climbs over trees or shrubs and grows so...

 shrouded landscapes and the site where Emmett Till
Emmett Till
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married...

 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
Muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy is a group of muscle diseases that weaken the musculoskeletal system and hamper locomotion. Muscular dystrophies are characterized by progressive skeletal muscle weakness, defects in muscle proteins, and the death of muscle cells and tissue.In the 1860s, descriptions of boys who...

 on her husband Larry Mann. The project was displayed in Gagosian Gallery in October 2009.

Mann's eighth book, The Flesh and The Spirit, published in 2010, was released in conjunction with a comprehensive show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Virginia Museum of Fine arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, which opened in 1936.The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia, while private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the support of specific programs and all...

 in Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...

. Though not a retrospective, this 200 page book includes new and recent work (unpublished self-portraits, landscapes, images of her husband, her children's faces, and of the dead at a forensic institute) as well as early works (unpublished color photographs of her children in the 1990s, color Polaroids and platinum prints from the 1970s). Its unifying theme is the body, with its vagaries of illnesses and death, and includes essays by John Ravenal, David Levi Strauss and Anne Wilkes Tucker
Anne Wilkes Tucker
Anne Wilkes Tucker is an American museum curator of photographic works. Tucker was born in Baton Rouge. She received a B.A. in Art History from Randolph Macon Woman's College in 1967, and an A.A.S in Photographic Illustration from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1968...

.

Her current projects include a series of self-portraits, a multipart study of the legacy of slavery in Virginia, and an intimate images of her family and life. The latter, entitled "Marital Trust," spans 30 years, and includes intimate details of her family life with Larry.

In May 2011 she delivered the three-day Massey Lecture Series at Harvard
Massey Lectures (Harvard University)
The William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization is a series of public lectures held every one or two years at Harvard University since 1984. They are sponsored by the university's Program in the History of American Civilization. They were endowed by an anonymous donor...

.

Personal life

Mann has three children: Emmett, born in 1979, who for a time joined the Peace Corps
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...

, Jessie (herself an artist, photographer and model), born in 1981, and Virginia (now in law school), born in 1985. Mann lives on a farm in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

 with her husband, Larry. He is a full time attorney
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

, and has muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy is a group of muscle diseases that weaken the musculoskeletal system and hamper locomotion. Muscular dystrophies are characterized by progressive skeletal muscle weakness, defects in muscle proteins, and the death of muscle cells and tissue.In the 1860s, descriptions of boys who...

, with progressive weakness.

Mann is passionate about endurance horse racing
Endurance riding
Endurance riding is an equestrian sport based on controlled long-distance races. It is one of the international competitions recognized by the FEI. There are endurance rides worldwide....

. In 2006, Mann's horse had an aneurysm
Aneurysm
An aneurysm or aneurism is a localized, blood-filled balloon-like bulge in the wall of a blood vessel. Aneurysms can commonly occur in arteries at the base of the brain and an aortic aneurysm occurs in the main artery carrying blood from the left ventricle of the heart...

 while she was riding him. In the horse's death throes, Mann was thrown to the ground and the impact broke her back. It took her two years to recover from the accident and during this time, she made a series of ambrotype
Ambrotype
right|thumb|Many ambrotypes were made by unknown photographers, such as this American example of a small girl holding a flower, circa 1860. Because of their fragility ambrotypes were held in folding cases much like those used for [[daguerreotype]]s...

 self-portraits. These self-portraits were on view for the first time in November 2010 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as a part of Sally Mann: the Flesh and the Spirit.

She is currently represented by the Gagosian Gallery
Gagosian Gallery
Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. There are currently eleven gallery spaces: three in New York; two in London; one in each of Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Paris, Geneva, Hong Kong and Moscow.-1980s:...

 of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

.

Recognition

Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

, the Corcoran Gallery of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...

, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the...

, the Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...

, in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

, and the Whitney Museum of New York City among many others.

Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

 magazine named Mann "America's Best Photographer" in 2001. Photos she took have appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...

twice: first, a picture of her three children for the September 27, 1992 issue with a feature article on her "disturbing work," and again on September 9. 2001, with a self-portrait (which also included her two daughters) for a theme issue on "Women Looking at Women."

Mann has been the subject of two film documentaries. The first, Blood Ties
Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann
Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann is a 1994 short documentary film directed by Steven Cantor and Peter Spirer. It was premiered at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short....

,
was directed by Steve Cantor
Steven Cantor
Steven Cantor is an American film/television director and film/television producer. Notable works include the films “What Remains”, “loudQUIETloud”, "Devil's Playground " and “Blood Ties”...

, debuted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Short. The second, What Remains
What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann
What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann is a 1994 film directed and produced by Steven Cantor, which documents the photography and story of photographer Sally Mann at her Virginia farm home...

was also directed by Steve Cantor. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...

 and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008. In her New York Times review of the film, Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante is an American writer and critic for the New York Times. She has also written for Time magazine....

 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 received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts
Doctor of Fine Arts
Doctor of Fine Arts is doctoral degree in fine arts, typically given as an honorary degree . The degree is typically conferred to honor the recipient who has made a contribution to society in the arts...

 degree
Academic degree
An academic degree is a position and title within a college or university that is usually awarded in recognition of the recipient having either satisfactorily completed a prescribed course of study or having conducted a scholarly endeavour deemed worthy of his or her admission to the degree...

 from the Corcoran Museum in May 2006.

Books

  • Second Sight: The Photographs of Sally Mann. David Godine, Boston, 1983. ISBN 978-0879234713
  • At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. Aperture, New York, 1988. ISBN 978-0893812966
  • Immediate Family. Aperture, New York, 1992. ISBN 978-0893815189
  • Still Time. Aperture, New York, 1994. ISBN 978-0893815936
  • What Remains. Bullfinch Press, New York, 2003. ISBN 978-0821228432
  • Deep South. Bullfinch Press, New York, 2005. ISBN 978-0821228760
  • Sally Mann: Proud Flesh. Aperture Press and the Gagosian Gallery, New York City, NY, 2009. ISBN 978-1597111355
  • Sally Mann: The Flesh And The Spirit. Aperture Press and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA, 2010. ISBN 978-1-59711-162-1

Exhibit catalogues

  • The Lewis Law Portfolio, at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1997
  • Sweet Silent Thought, at the North Carolina Center for Creative Photography, Durham, NC, 1987
  • Still Time, at the Allegheny Highland Arts and Crafts Center, Clifton Forge, VA, 1988
  • Mother Land, at the Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York City, NY, 1997
  • Sally Mann, at the Gagosian Gallery, New York City, NY, 2006
  • Sally Mann: Deep South/Battlefields, at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden, 2007

Collections

  • The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry. Bullfinch Press, Washington, DC, 1996. ISBN 978-0821222607
  • Nature Conservancy, In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy's Last Great Places. Bullfinch Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0821227411
  • Ferdinand Protzman, Landscape: Photographs of time and Place. National Geographic, 2003. ISBN 978-0792261667
  • R. H. Cravens, Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50. Aperture Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1931788373
  • Aperture
    Aperture (magazine)
    Aperture is a quarterly photography magazine and a book publisher based in New York, New York. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to fine art photography.-Magazine:...

    journals:
    • Issue 143 Spring 1996 (Everything That Lives, Eats) ISBN 978-0893816865
    • Issue 168 Fall 2002 (50th Anniversary Part 1) ISBN 089819999
    • Issue 194 Spring 2009 Untitled.

Other

  • Sally Mann. 21st Editions, South Dennis MA, 2004, ISBN 1-892733-27-7. A boxed collection of individual prints and poems.


External links


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