Sally Mann

Sally Mann
November 2007, by Michelle Hood
Birth name	Sally Turner Munger
Born	(1951-05-01) May 1, 1951 Lexington, Virginia
Nationality	American
Field	Photography
Influenced by	Diane Arbus
Awards	• National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship: 1982, 1988, & 1992. • John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1987. • Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, 2006. • Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society, 2012

Sally Mann is an American 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, Mann was the third of three children and the only daughter. 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 graduated from The Putney School in 1969, and attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and a MA 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 father encouraged her interest in photography; 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 its 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 in Washington, D.C. 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 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.”

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 (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 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 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, 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, 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’s fifth book, What Remains, published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC and is in five parts. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound, after decomposition. The second part has the photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal Forensic Anthropology 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. 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 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. 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 in Richmond, Virginia. 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.

Her current projects include a series of self-portraits, a multipart study of the legacy of slavery in Virginia, and 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. In June 2011, Mann sat down with one of her contemporaries, Nan Goldin, at Look3 Charlottesville Festival of the Photograph. The two photographers discussed their respective careers, particularly the ways in which photographing personal lives became a source of professional controversy. This was followed by an appearance at the University of Michigan as part of the Penny W. Stamps lecture series.

Personal life

Mann has three children: Emmett, born in 1979, who for a time joined the Peace Corps, Jessie (herself an artist, photographer and model), born in 1981, and Virginia (now a lawyer), born in 1985. Mann lives on a farm in Virginia with her husband, Larry. He is a full-time attorney, and has muscular dystrophy, with progressive weakness.

Mann is passionate about endurance horse racing. In 2006, Mann's horse ruptured an aneurysm 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 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 of New York City, and the Edwynn Houk Gallery also of New York City. The latter has a show of Mann's works opening September 13, 2012.

Recognition

Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of New York City among many others.

Time magazine named Mann "America's Best Photographer" in 2001. Photos she took have appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine 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, was directed by Steve Cantor, debuted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Short. The second, What Remains was also directed by Steve 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 received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Corcoran Museum in May 2006.

Publications

Books

• Second Sight: The Photographs of Sally Mann. David Godine, Boston, 1983. ISBN 978-0-87923-471-3
• At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. Aperture, New York, 1988. ISBN 978-0-89381-296-6
• Immediate Family. Aperture, New York, 1992. ISBN 978-0-89381-518-9
• Still Time. Aperture, New York, 1994. ISBN 978-0-89381-593-6
• What Remains. Bullfinch Press, New York, 2003. ISBN 978-0-8212-2843-2
• Deep South. Bullfinch Press, New York, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8212-2876-0
• Sally Mann: Proud Flesh. Aperture Press and the Gagosian Gallery, New York City, NY, 2009. ISBN 978-1-59711-135-5
• 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 978-0-8212-2260-7
• Nature Conservancy, In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy's Last Great Places. Bullfinch Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-8212-2741-1
• Ferdinand Protzman, Landscape: Photographs of time and Place. National Geographic, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7922-6166-7
• R. H. Cravens, Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50. Aperture Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-931788-37-3
• Aperture journals:
  • Issue 143 Spring 1996 (Everything That Lives, Eats) ISBN 978-0-89381-686-5
  • 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.

References

Notes

External links

• Sally Mann's Website.
• Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season One (2001).
• TV interview with Charlie Rose in 2003.
• 21st Photography Platinum Series by Sally Mann, a Lucie Award Winner in 2005.
• Sally Mann Exhibition at Gagosian Gallery
• Works by or about Sally Mann in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Links to sites with her photographs:
  • Link to some pictures from Immediate Family.
  • Link to more Sally Mann pictures.
  • Immediate Family and Landscape images at Strother Fine Arts.
• Links to sites about the documentaries:
  • Blood Ties (1994) at the Internet Movie Database
  • What Remains (2005) at the Internet Movie Database
  • Sally Mann at the Internet Movie Database