Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, to Robert and Elizabeth Munger. She grew up in Lexington, graduating from the Putney School, where she first became interested in photography. Mann used a 5x7 camera and always favored large formats in her work. She claims her interest in the art came from having time alone with her boyfriend in the darkroom. However, after she went to Bennington College, she earned a master’s degree in creative writing, not photography.
After graduation, she worked as a staff photographer for Washington and Lee University, and her first exhibiton consisted of the construction of their new Law Library. The exhibition premiered in 1977, and the photographs were inculded in her first book, Second Sight.
Her second collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, created controversy. Her main subjects were adolsecent girls, and the images were dark and brooding. Immediate Family, her third collection, focused on her own three children, who were mostly photographed in the nude. Though this also met with much controversy and accusations of child pornography, critics hailed the book as showing a wide-reaching vision, and Mann considered the photographs to show children through the eyes of a mother, who sees them in all their different states and emotions. In 1994, she published Still Time, included over twenty years of photography, and included photos of her children as well as landscapes and abstract pictures. Sally was well known for her dark, foreboding landscapes taken in Virginia. These were featured in Deep South, published in 2005. The haunting images called up dreams of history behind the abandoned battlefields and crumbling mansions.
One of her most famous photographs is called “candy cigarette”, and portrays themes of adolescence and the hardships of growing up.
One of my favorite images by Sally Mann is a photograph called “The Dress”. I think the dreamy blur of the background and the windblown gauze of the dress make it seem like a child’s fairytale dream. It captures the child in a moment of inncence, lost in the folds of her billowing dress. The stark contrast of the black lace is eye-catching and intriguing. Another favorite is is “Two times Jessie Mann”, which shows two side-by-side shots of Sally’s daughter Jessie. One portrays her as natural, makeup free, and with a wide-eyed, almost frightened look on her face, like a deer regarding the hunter. The other shows her heavily made up with lipstick, eye makeup, and a beauty mark, as well as a more revealing shirt, and her expression is harder to identify, scrutinizing the viewer with an unnamed but more mature emotion. This contrast shows either a process of growing up and transformation, or perhaps the two sides that exist in so many people.
