Sally Mann
Sally Mann (born 1951, Lexington, Virginia) is one of the most significant and critically engaged photographers working in America today, whose practice spans over five decades of rigorous investigation into landscape, memory, mortality, and the American South. Educated at Hollins College and a longtime resident of Lexington, Virginia, she developed her practice in deliberate dialogue with the history of photography, employing nineteenth-century processes including wet-plate collodion to produce images of unusual formal beauty and psychological depth.
Her series Immediate Family, produced between 1984 and 1994, brought her widespread recognition and considerable controversy, its intimate photographs of her three children raising fundamental questions about the ethics of representation and the nature of childhood. Subsequent bodies of work, including Deep South, What Remains, and Battlefields, extended her investigation to the landscape of the American South, exploring the physical traces of violence, history, and time on the land itself. A close friend of Cy Twombly, her photographs of his studio in the years before his death were published as Remembered Light in 2016.
Her work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.