About
To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.
—Sally Mann
Sally Mann is known for her photographs of intimate and familiar subjects rendered both sublime and disquieting. Her projects explore the complexities of familial relationships, social realities, and the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature, history, and memory.
Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann began to study photography in the late 1960s, attending the Ansel Adams Gallery’s Yosemite Workshops in Yosemite National Park, California and the Putney School and Bennington College, both in Vermont. She received a BA from Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia, in 1974, and an MA in creative writing the following year. At a moment when many other photographers were creating large-scale color prints, Mann looked to photography’s past, investigating the visual and metaphorical potential of employing nineteenth-century technologies. She has long used an 8 x 10 bellows camera and has explored platinum, bromoil, and wet-plate collodion processes for making prints.
Mann had her first solo museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1977, presenting The Lewis Law Portfolio (1974–76), a series of black-and-white photographs that comprise some of her earliest explorations into the inherent abstract beauty of the everyday. In the early 1980s she published two books, Second Sight and At Twelve, the latter a study of young girls on the cusp of womanhood. Between 1984 and 1994 she worked on the series Family Pictures, which focused on her three children, then all under the age of twelve. These works touch on ordinary moments—playing, sleeping, and eating—as well as larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality and motherhood. From 1999 to 2012, Mann photographed Cy Twombly’s warmly lit studio in Lexington, recording the moments she spent with him there as well as the traces of his artistic life.
Photo: © Annie Leibovitz
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Website
Exhibitions
to light, and then return—Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann
This fall, artists and friends Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann will exhibit new works together in New York. Inspired by their shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis, the works included will form a dialogue between their respective practices. Here they meet to speak about the origins and developments of the project.
Now available
Gagosien Quarterly Spring 2023
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosien Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
Sally Mann and Benjamin Moser
During the 2022 edition of Paris Photo, Sally Mann and Benjamin Moser sat down for an intimate conversation as the first event in Gagosien’s Paris Salon series, initiated by Jessie Fortune Ryan. In light of Moser’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag, Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), recently translated into French, the two discussed the power and responsibility tied up in their respective practices of photography and writing.
Sally Mann: Vinculum
Join Sally Mann at her studio in Lexington, Virginia. Filmed at work in her darkroom and within the surrounding landscape, she discusses her exploratory approach to making and printing pictures, what draws her to the landscape of the American South, and her newest body of work, Vinculum.
In Conversation
Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann
Sally Mann joins Edmund de Waal onstage at the Frick Collection in New York to converse about art, writing, and the importance of place in their respective bodies of work.
In Conversation
Sally Mann and Jenny Saville
The two artists discuss being drawn to difficult subjects, the effects of motherhood on their practice, embracing chance, and their shared adoration of Cy Twombly.
Now available
Gagosien Quarterly Spring 2019
The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosien Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Drew Gilpin Faust discusses Sally Mann’s landscape photographs of Antietam, a site that more than a century ago bore witness to one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War.
Gagosien Quarterly Spring 2018
The Spring 2018 Gagosien Quarterly with a cover by Ed Ruscha is now available for order.
Sally Mann: Remembered Light
Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann discuss Cy Twombly’s relationship to photography, Mann’s pervasive interest in the American South, and the context behind her newest body of work.
In Conversation
Sally Mann
In Sally Mann’s new memoir Hold Still, her lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs make up an original personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel. In this interview with Derek Blasberg, she reflects on discovering family history, her relationship to criticism, and why she will never leave Virginia.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Paris Photo 2022
Deana Lawson and Sally Mann
November 10–13, 2022
Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris
www.parisphoto.com
For the 2022 edition of Paris Photo, Gagosien is pleased to announce a joint presentation of works by Deana Lawson and Sally Mann. The two artists collaborated to choose photographs from one another’s oeuvre, including some that have never before been exhibited. The resulting selection establishes a dialogue between their respective practices, using portrait, landscape, and interior imagery to examine themes of identity and representation.
Gagosien’s booth at Paris Photo 2022, featuring photographs by Deana Lawson and Sally Mann. Artwork © Deana Lawson and © Sally Mann
Award
Sally Mann
Lucie Award 2022
Sally Mann will receive a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art at the gala ceremony at Carnegie Hall in New York on October 25, 2022. The Lucie Awards were launched in 2003 as part of the Lucie Foundation’s mission to honor master photographers, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide.
Sally Mann, Lexington, Virginia, 2015. Photo: © Annie Leibovitz
Award
Sally Mann
Prix Pictet
Sally Mann is the winner of the ninth cycle of the Prix Pictet, which aims to harness the power of photography to draw global attention to issues of sustainability, particularly concerning the environment. The thematic focus of this award cycle is “fire.” Mann has been recognized for her Blackwater series (2008–12), a multifaceted exploration of the Great Dismal Swamp, which spans the border of Virginia and North Carolina. Viewed by the artist as “a vessel for the memories of the complex struggles enacted upon it,” the swamp was long a treacherous refuge for people escaping slavery, and had been devastated by wildfires by the time Mann photographed it. The award ceremony took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on December 15, 2021, in advance of the opening of an exhibition at the museum showcasing the twelve photographic series shortlisted for the prize.
Sally Mann, Blackwater 3, 2008–12 © Sally Mann
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Sally Mann in
People Watching: Contemporary Photography Since 1965
Through November 5, 2023
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine
www.bowdoin.edu
This exhibition explores the phenomenon of people-watching as a recreational activity, an act of surveillance, a type of harassment, a sign of empathy, and a documentary form of expression. It brings together more than 120 photographs that investigate the myriad ways in which artists have represented individuals encountered on the street, at home, at work, in the studio, and on documentary or journalistic assignments. Work by Sally Mann is included.
Sally Mann, Naptime, 1989 © Sally Mann
On View
New Symphony of Time
Opened September 7, 2019
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson
www.msmuseumart.org
New Symphony of Time expands the boundaries of Mississippi’s identity, casting light on a shared past to help reflect an expansive, more inclusive future. The exhibition aims to explore personal and collective memory, history and the connection to place, and the roles artists play in pursuit of civil rights and racial equity through ancestry. Themes include migration, movement, and home; shared humanity; environment; and liberty. Work by Titus Kaphar and Sally Mann is included.
Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Emmett Till River Bank), 1998 © Sally Mann
Closed
Love Songs
Photography and Intimacy
June 1–September 11, 2023
International Center of Photography, New York
www.icp.org
Love Songs features photographic projects about love and intimacy from sixteen contemporary photographers, including Nan Goldin and Sally Mann. Through the myriad lens of intimate relationships, the exhibition brings together series dating from 1952 to 2022 that explore love, desire, and intimacy in complex and contradictory ways.
Sally Mann, Semaphore, 2003 © Sally Mann
Closed
Sally Mann in
Drawn to the Light: 50 Years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + College
June 16–September 10, 2023
Portland Museum of Art, Maine
www.portlandmuseum.org
Maine Media Workshops + College has drawn photographers to Rockport, Maine, for half a century. Instructors and students formed a community around their passion for the art form and its capacity for personal expression and visual storytelling. With around a hundred works made through an array of photographic practices, this exhibition demonstrates the incredible vitality of the artists that have passed through Maine and the wide influence of the workshops on photography more broadly. Work by Sally Mann is included.
Sally Mann, Leah and her Father, 1983–85 © Sally Mann
Press
A photograph that captures the profound ambivalence between children and parents by Sebastian Smee
Washington Post
February 9, 2022
Online
PDF
Review: A child in 'The Ditch' and other mesmerizing moments in 'Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings' at the Getty by Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
January 2, 2019
Online
PDF
Sally Mann’s Dark Diary of the South by Carole Naggar
New York Review of Books
October 27, 2018
Online
PDF