Discover the Best Books Written by Sally Mann

Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer who has made large format black and white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death. Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children. 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 was raised by an atheist and compassionate father who allowed Mann to be "benignly neglected." Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest in photography; his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today. Mann began to photograph when she was sixteen. Most of her photographs and writings are tied to Lexington, Virginia. Mann graduated from The Putney School in 1969 and attended Bennington College and Friends World College. 

She earned a BA, 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. Mann has never had any formal training in photography, and she "never read[s] about photography."

After graduating from Hollins College, 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 solo exhibition in late 1977 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The Corcoran Gallery of Art published a catalog of Mann's images titled "The Lewis Law Portfolio." Some of those surrealistic images were also included as part of her first book, Second Sight, published in 1984. 

While Mann explored a variety of genres as she was maturing in the 1970s, she indeed found her trade with her book, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (Aperture, 1988). In 1995, she was featured in an issue of "Aperture." On Location with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Graciela Iturbide, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, Andres Serrano, Clarissa Sligh," which was illustrated with photographs.

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 expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images." In the preface to the book, Ann Beattie says, "when a girl is twelve years old, she often wants – or says she wants – less involvement with adults. It is a time in which the girls yearn for freedom and adults feel their own grip on things becoming a little tenuous, as they realize that they have to let their children go."

 Beattie says that Mann's photographs don't "glamorize the world, but they don't make it into something more unpleasant than it is, either." The girls photographed in this series are shown "vulnerable in their youthfulness" but Mann instead focuses on the strength that the girls possess. In one image from the book shown here, Mann says that the young girl was extremely reluctant to stand closer to her mother's boyfriend. 

Mann said that she thought it was strange because "it was their peculiar familiarity that had provoked this photograph in the first place." Mann didn't want to crop out the girl's elbow, but the girl refused to move in closer. According to Mann, the girl's mother shot her boyfriend in the face with a .22 several months later. In court, the mother "testified that while she worked nights at a local truck stop, he was at home partying and harassing my daughter.'" Mann said, "the child put it to me somewhat more directly." Mann says that she now looks at this photograph with "a jaggy chill of realization."