Sally Mann

Born in Lexinton, Virginia in 1951, Sally Mann is an internationally renowned
American photographer. She first studied photography at the Putney School in
Vermont in 1969, and then at Bennington College under Norman Sieff. Since then,
she has stayed close to her roots in the American South and her relationship
with her origins is at the very heart of her work. The South, at once nation,
graveyard, and battlefield, plays a key role in both her identity and her photography.

Sally
Mann captures life and landscapes and has also taken many portraits. She is perhaps
best known for her book Immediate Family
which she produced between 1984 and 1994, and which was the subject of significant
controversy. Her work tackles the ordinary moments of day to day life,
encompassing things as simple as sleeping, eating, and playing, and as complex
as death or the perception of childhood across different cultures. She
attracted disapproval for her practice of exhibiting her family, most notably
her children, who she often photographed nude, sometimes mimicking the
attitudes of adults in provocative poses. This was hugely polemical and many
people considered her work to be inappropriate. In her latest series, compiled
over six years and completed in 2009, Mann has turned her lens on her husband who
suffers from muscular dystrophy. She composed a harrowing, deeply moving series
of portraits showing him as totally vulnerable, reversing the stereotypical
perception of men as a strong protector figure. The artist has also produced a
series of landscapes: Deep South
(Bullfinch Press, 2001) is a striking study of mortality. In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003) she captures images of the
body in stages of decomposition, photographing both animals and human corpses
at the Institute of Judicial Anthropology at the University of Tennessee (Body
Farm, 2000-2001).

Although
she has experimented with working in colour, she remains drawn to black and
white and the 8x10 format. Mann has also explored the processes of printing on
platinum and bromoil and in the early 90s she was interested in the behaviour
of wet collodion on glass.

Mann has received numerous
grants and rewards for her work, including the Guggenheim Foundation Grant. Her
photographs have been exhibited in a variety of public institutions across the
USA and abroad, notably in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), the Whitney Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute and, in 2018, a
retrospective of A Thousand Crossings was held in the National Gallery in
Washington DC. She has also been given a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume
Museum in Paris in 2019.