Sally Mann

Sally Mann, born Sally Turner Munger on May 1, 1951, is an American photographer. She works with large-format black-and-white film, capturing the people and places closest to her: her children, her husband, the rural landscapes around her, and herself.

She grew up in Lexington, Virginia, the youngest of three children. Her father, a general practitioner, and her mother, who ran a college bookstore, raised her there. Her father gave her an early introduction to photography, letting her use his 5x7 camera—the same type of large-format camera she still uses. She started taking pictures at sixteen. Most of her photographs and writing are tied to Lexington. After graduating from The Putney School in 1969, she attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She earned a BA summa cum laude from Hollins College in 1974 and an MA in creative writing the following year. She has said her real motive for taking up photography at Putney was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend. She never received formal training in photography and has stated she never reads about it.

After college, Mann worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee University. In the mid-1970s, she documented the construction of the university’s new law school building. Those images became her first solo exhibition, held in late 1977 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The Corcoran published a catalogue of the work, titled *The Lewis Law Portfolio*. Some of the images had a surreal quality. They later appeared in her first book, *Second Sight*, published in 1984. As she developed her style through the 1970s, she found her true direction with her 1988 book *At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women*.

In 1995, she was featured in an issue of *Aperture* titled “On Location with: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Graciela Iturbide, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, Andres Serrano, Clarissa Sligh,” which included photographs.

*At Twelve* stirred minor controversy. The images captured the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls, with an expressive printing style that gave them a dramatic, brooding mood. In the preface, author Ann Beattie wrote that at twelve, girls often say they want less involvement with adults, describing it as a time when girls yearn for freedom and adults feel their grip loosening as they realize they must let their children go.