Yet Mann wrote it felt appropriate that “a place so filled with pain should, a century and a half later, be devoured by an all-cleansing fire. Place". Episode One. Art 21- Directed by Catherine Tatge, Art in the Twenty-First Century for PBS Broadcasting, Virginia. 14 minutes. Color. DVD. (2002) Around a quarter of the 60 images Mann published showed her children unclothed, their bodies often holding evidence from their play on the farm. Sometimes, Mann would pose her children, or collaborate with them for staged scenes. Sometimes, these staged images included nudity too.

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. Mann photographed her husband using the collodion wet plate process [30] As she notes, "The results of this rare reversal of photographic roles are candid, extraordinarily wrenching and touchingly frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moment." [13] The project was displayed in Gagosian Gallery in October 2009. She took up photography at Putney where, she has said, her motive was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend. [9] Mann has never had any formal training in photography and she "never read[s] about photography". [10] Early career [ edit ] She began to photograph when she 16, telling the New York Times that her motive at the time was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend, Larry, the man that soon become her husband and father to her children.

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Mann's 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. Mann writes that the people living under bondage "viewed the swamp as preferable to the living hell of enslavement." 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 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. [6] Mann began to photograph when she was sixteen. Most of her photographs and writings are tied to Lexington, Virginia. [7] 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. [8]

Giving Up the Ghost". Egg, The Arts Show. Produced by Mary Recine for Thirteen/WNET, New York. (2002)At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a 1988 photography book by Sally Mann. The book is published by Aperture and contains 37 duotone images of 12-year-old girls. The girls are the children of friends and relatives of Mann in her home state Virginia. [1] Unlike Mann's later work, the images within the book do not feature nudity. The book is dedicated to Mann's husband, Larry. [2] Reception [ edit ] Kee, Joan (2019). "Arts of Disengagement: Sally Mann's 'Immediate Family' ". Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America. University of California Press. pp.163–190 . Retrieved November 7, 2023. R. H. Cravens, Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50. Aperture Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-931788-37-3 Some Things Are Private". Playwrights Deborah Salem Smith, Laura Kepley. Trinity Repertory Theatre, Dowling Theater. Providence, RI. (2008)

Sally Mann" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 14, 2017 . Retrieved November 7, 2023. Mann became widely known for Immediate Family, her third collection, first exhibited in 1990 by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City and published as a monograph in 1992. [17] In a cover story for the The New York Times Magazine, Richard B. Woodward wrote that "Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world". [9] Mann's family portraiture was born of a simple desire to chronicle the formative years of her own children. Brought up in a rural household, by bohemian parents whose relaxed attitude towards nudity saw Mann and her siblings playing in the family's farmyard completely unclothed, she thought nothing of photographing her own children naked or in stages of undress. Her collection Immediate Family (1992) would become a benchmark in family portraiture, but, as with At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, it saw Mann accused by her distractors of sexualizing minors.

In the early 1990s, various political groups and the media were concerned about growing incidences of child pornography in society. It was in this context that Immediate Family was "delegitimized", in an act of what the sociologist Jeff Ferrell called "cultural criminalization". Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, for instance, protested that "selling photographs of children in their nakedness for profit is an exploitation of the parental role". Other members of the public wrote to Mann suggesting that her photographs would lead to her children suffering psychological trauma, and would likely result in at least one pedophile moving to Lexington and prowl the town's streets. Parsons, Sarah (2008). " 'Public/Private Tensions in The Photography of Sally Mann' ". History of Photography. 32 (2): 124–125. doi: 10.1080/03087290801895720. S2CID 194099344. In May 2011 she delivered the three-day Massey Lecture Series at Harvard, [35] on the topic of how her extended family influenced her work. Her memoir Hold Still arose as a companion to the lecture. [36] 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. [37] This was followed by an appearance at the University of Michigan as part of the Penny W. Stamps lecture series. [38]