DAY 303

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Sally Mann (1951–)

SUBLIME IMPERFECTION

Sally Mann’s large, black and white photographs portray a variety of subjects, from her young children, to death and decay and Southern landscapes. Although she is a modern-day photographer, Mann chooses to work with the archaic wet-collodion process, which was introduced in the 1850s and requires a long exposure time (see page 259). The finished photographs contain a dreamy, eerie sensibility, often dusted with serendipitous streaks and imperfections.

A self-taught photographer, Mann’s best-known work, titled Immediate Family, chronicled her young children swimming and playing nude at the family’s remote summer cabin. The images generated both censure and praise from national newspapers and journals. Regardless of public opinion, Mann continued to shoot her family, including self-portraits and a six-year series of nudes of her husband, who has muscular dystrophy.

Mann has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her life has been the subject of two documentary films, Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann and What Remains, both directed by Steven Cantor. —GC