Even today, more than twenty years after the series’ initial publication, Sally Mann is most well-known for her provocative depictions of her children’s injuries and nakedness, times when they grappled with death and darkness, as well as the everyday occurrences of childhood, such as playtime and bedwetting.
Many of her photographs pay homage to her family farm in Lexington, Virginia. Mann was born Sally Munger in the small town in 1951. She first studied photography at the Putney School in Vermont, where she attended high school. During her two years at Bennington College, she met her husband, Larry Mann.
Sally Mann transformed one of the most banal elements of family life—the sentimental photo album—into discomfiting, divisive, and ultimately unforgettable artwork. For her series “Immediate Family,” she shot her three children (Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia) in vulnerable positions at their summer home in rural Virginia.
Artist Sally Mann photographed her three children–Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia–every summer from their infancy in the mid-1980s until they reached puberty in the 1990s.
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) is best known for her black-and-white photographs, featuring portraiture and landscapes in the southern United States. Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, and attended Hollins College.
In the late 1990s, Mann began to make glass negatives using the collodion wet-plate process, a nineteenth-century technique that involves coating a glass plate with a syrupy substance called collodion and a light-sensitive solution of silver salts.
PhotographySally Mann / FormPhotography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. Wikipedia
For some time, Mann had been photographing young girls in and around Lexington, several of whose parents had been delivered into the world by her father, for the book published in 1988 as "At Twelve." She wanted to catch the tension in their bodies, eyes and gestures as they passed into the confused state when girls ...
"To achieve something great," she says, "you have to work really hard at it." Mann, who says she has been influenced by 19th-century photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron and Eugène Atget, believes that the wet collodion process adds to the timeless look of her photographs.
71 years (May 1, 1951)Sally Mann / Age
Mann first found herself mired in controversy after her series of black-and-white portraits, entitled “Immediate Family,” was unveiled in the spring of 1992 at Houk Friedman, a gallery in New York City.
Hollins University1975Hollins University1974Bennington College1969–1971The Putney School1969Sally Mann/Education
Mann, 65, who has always found her inspiration close to home, “in what William Carlos Williams called 'the local,'” she wrote in her memoir. In this local realm she has created photographs of lush Southern landscapes and studies of her husband's body revealing the effects of his progressive muscular dystrophy.
How did the photographer of the above image break the distance between the viewer and the subject? She allowed the subjects to sense the camera. Who took the above photograph?
How did the photographer immerse herself in the culture of the image above? She was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor. What was the purpose of Cindy Sherman's photography? To portray the various roles and identities of herself and other modern women.
Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & CanadaSally Mann / Awards
Even today, more than twenty years after the series’ initial publication, Sally Mann is most well-known for her provocative depictions of her children’s injuries and nakedness, times when they grappled with death and darkness, as well as the everyday occurrences of childhood, such as playtime and bedwetting.
From Mann’s perspective, the naked child represents the most basic, primal way to look at the human body, as it epitomizes the essence of an individual before they develop and society sexualizes them. In this sense, Mann’s art is simultaneously specific to her children as individuals and universal, applying to the life and childhood ...
Despite their controversial subjects, hundreds of Mann’s prints have sold for millions of dollars. Indeed, Mann is a brave and original artist, and “probably no photographer in history has experienced such a burst of success in the art world” 10 as she has.
In this sense, Mann’s art is simultaneously specific to her children as individuals and universal, applying to the life and childhood of all individuals. Her work depicts her three children as representative of all of humanity. It challenges “assumptions of childhood innocence” 3 by showing that children do possess an undeveloped sexuality ...
The resulting images, which made up Mann’s series, Immediate Family, were taken on the family’s 400-acre farm deep in the woods of rural Virginia and chronicled ...
Common criticisms revolved around “gendered assumptions” about a mother’s role as a protector 2, the consent (or lack thereof) of the children as subjects, and the possibility that these images could provoke inappropriate actions among viewers. The nudity was also an issue for publications that wanted to publish Mann’s images.
A prosecutor that Mann sought advice from warned her of the possibility of legal action against her. She was not pursued on charges, however, and lawyers like Edward de Grazia from the Benjamin Cardoza School of Law in New York have fought to protect her art under the First Amendment.
Motoring among the spectators like honorees at a testimonial dinner, Mann’s three children — Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10, and Virginia, ...
Since the beginning of the year, Houk Friedman has taken orders for more than 300 prints, well over a half-million dollars worth of photographs, and the waiting period for delivery of new prints is at least a year. Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world.
The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann. Credit... This cover story appeared in the magazine on Sept. 27, 1992, and is discussed in an article by Sally Mann in the April 19 issue. At the opening last spring of “Immediate Family,” Sally Mann’s show at the Houk Friedman Gallery in New York, the winsome young subjects of the photographs aroused as ...
The family portraits began in 1984, when Jessie came home from a neighbor’s, her face swollen with gnat bites.
As she writes in the introduction to “Immediate Family,” Sally Mann inherited the role of provocateur from her father, Robert Munger, a doctor who made house calls in an Aston Martin and delivered hundreds of babies in Lexington.
Ex-”dirt hippies” who still grow much of their own food and until a decade and a half ago barely made enough money to pay taxes, Sally and Larry Mann are a tight couple. Both “Immediate Family” and “At Twelve,” her portraits of local girls on the cusp of puberty, are dedicated to him.
Several of the photographs in “Immediate Family” refer to more famous ones — by Robert Frank (“Tobacco Spit”), Emmet Gowin (“Fallen Child”), Dorothea Lange (“Damaged Child”) and Edward Weston (“Popsicle Drips”).