This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Sally Mann.
Born: 1 May 1951, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Sally Turner Munger
Despite a career that has been mired in controversy, Sally Mann remains one of America’s premier living photographers. She is both revered and reviled for her unabashedly sensuous portraits of pre-pubescent girls and a series of naked portraits of her own children. While these works remain the pieces for which she will always be best known, Mann’s oeuvre is expansive and encompasses themes including landscapeture that touches on the difficult history of the Southern American states, and works that confront the taboo of death, including post-mortem human bodies in various states of decomposition. The recipient of countless professional honors and awards, Mann has achieved international fame without ever abandoning her rural Virginia roots.
Childhood
Sally Turner Munger was the youngest of three children born to Robert Munger, a doctor who drove around Lexington, Virginia in his Aston Martin (luxury British sports car) making house calls and delivering babies, and, Elizabeth Evans Munger, a bookstore manager at Washington and Lee University. Sally’s primary maternal figure, however, was her nanny, an African-American woman named Virginia Carter who took day-to-day care of Sally and her siblings. She described her childhood, during which she usually played unclothed, as “‘unconventional’, ‘rural’ and ‘near-feral'”, adding that, we were “middle class but bohemian: no church, no country club, no television”.
Having inherited his love of photography, Sally would borrow her father’s 5×7 camera (which may account for her preference for large format photography in her professional career). He also bought his daughter her first Leica (35mm hand-held) camera. Art critic Richard B. Woodward explains that it was Dr. Munger “who instilled a shameless attitude toward the flesh in his daughter, photographing her nude as a girl”. Unimpressed with her father’s efforts, Sally later called her father’s attempts at nude portraiture “terrible art”.
Education and Early Training
In 1969, Sally graduated from the Putney School, a private boarding school in Vermont. While at Putney, she signed up to a photography module (though she later admitted that her primary motivation was to be able to be alone with her boyfriend in the darkroom). One of her first photographic works was a nude portrait of a classmate. She then attended Bennington College, a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont, where she studied with South African photographer and filmmaker, Norman Sieff. Having met him a year earlier at Bennington, Sally took the initiative and proposed to Larry Mann, a blacksmith/trainee attorney, who was three years her senior. Sally and Larry Mann were married in 1970.
Mann studied briefly at Friends World College, a small independent liberal arts institution that later merged with Long Island University (later Friends World Program). She then enrolled at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia, from where she graduated with first class honors, in 1974. The following year she earned an MA in creative writing, also from Hollins. Soon after graduating a second time, Mann worked as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University, documenting the construction of the school’s new law school building, the Lewis Hall. This led to Mann’s first solo exhibition in 1977 at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the publication of her, Lewis Law Portfolio (1977).
In 1979 Mann gave birth to the first of her three children. As art critic Richard B. Woodward explains, “Her solution to the demands of motherhood, which have eaten away at the schedules of artistic women throughout the ages, was ingenious: with her children as subjects, making art became a kind of childcare”. Emmett (who later served in the peace keeping corps of the military) was followed, respectively, in 1981 and 1985, by two daughters, Jessie (a future artist and wife of American photographer Len Prince), and Virginia (who followed her father’s career path by becoming a lawyer). Emmett suffered three significant brain injuries (the first when he was hit by a car as in childhood, and the two others resulting from accidents in adulthood) and was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Said Mann, “We don’t know if the injuries caused it, or exacerbated it, or if it was genetic”.
Mature Period
Mann’s first anthology, Second Sight, was published in 1984. As the Sotheby’s auction house describes, “[the book] includes a variety of photographs: landscapes, portraits, platinum still life studies, and selections from her ‘Lewis Law Portfolio’ [that] approximate the physical characteristics of two different types of photographs: silver prints reproduced on glossy stock [and] platinum prints reproduced on matte stock”. But it would be four more years before Mann gained acclaim and notoriety in equal measure with the publication of At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988).
The collection featured portraits of twelve-year-old girls, taken with Mann’s antique 8×10 view camera. It was an early example of Mann’s preference for older photographic technologies and processes which lend her images a vintage, almost otherworldly, quality. As if anticipating the criticism that accompanied Mann’s portraits, the book featured an introduction by the novelist Ann Beattie who wrote, “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose–what adults make of that pose may be the issue”.
Mann’s case was not helped when it emerged that one of the images in the series, Untitled (Theresa and the Tattooed Man), seemed to confirm the worries of her critics. The image shows a young girl in tight denim shorts with her arm resting on the shoulders of a large, tattooed adult. There is a palpable sense of friction between the two subjects (Mann later said how the girl refused to move any closer to the man). Indeed, a few months after the photograph was taken, it was claimed that the man, Theresa’s mother’s boyfriend, had been sexually abusing the girl and was duly shot in the face with a pocket pistol by the girl’s mother. Theresa’s mother stated in court that while she was working evening shifts at a local truck stop, her boyfriend was “at home partying and harassing my daughter” (Mann said that Theresa described the “harassment” to her “somewhat more directly”). Reflecting on the image, Mann said she looked at Theresa and the Tattooed Man with “a jaggy chill of realization”.
In 1991, during an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, broadcast evangelist Rev. Vic Eliason contacted the police and the district attorney claiming that Mann was exploiting her own children by exhibiting “indecent” images of them. No legal action was taken against Mann, but Eliason’s protest signaled the start of an on-going controversy in which Mann would have to defend her art against accusations of immorality and/or child pornography. Artforum refused to publish a picture of a nude Jessie swinging from a farmyard rope, and a review in The San Diego Tribune ran the headline: “It May Be Art, but What About the Kids?” The family portraits gained further notoriety when journalist Raymond Sokolov published an article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled Critique: Censoring Virginia, which was accompanied by a reproduction of a photograph of Mann’s naked four-year-old daughter Virginia, but with black bars placed across her eyes, nipples, and pubic region. Commenting on the censored image, Mann said, “it felt like a mutilation, not only of the image but also of Virginia herself and of her innocence. It made her feel, for the first time, that there was something wrong not just with the pictures but with her body”. Virginia, who was by now a little shy of six years old, even addressed a letter to Sokolov and his editor Daniel Henninger in which she wrote: “Dear sir, I don’t like the way you crossed me out”. The men apologized to Virginia personally but without retracting their criticism of her mother’s art.
The controversy surrounding Mann’s family portraits, which was published to acclaim as the collection, Immediate Family, in 1992, was addressed in a 1994 film, Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, Best Documentary, Short Subjects.
Sadly, in 1996 Larry was diagnosed with the muscle wasting disease, muscular dystrophy. Mann would chronicle in pictures the impact of the disease on her husband’s body over the coming decade.
Late Period
Mann was close friends with abstract artist Cy Twombly, who also lived in Lexington. They were first introduced by Mann’s father, who, in the mid-1940s, invited Twombly (then a high school senior) over to dinner. Mann’s parents were also early patrons of Twombly’s work, purchasing one of his house-paint and pencil paintings in 1955. Between 1999 and Twombly’s passing in 2011, Mann photographed the artist and his studio. Mann and Twombly also spent time together outside the studio, sitting on his favorite bench at the local Walmart (from where he could gaze at the mountains) or visiting a local Antique Mall where he enjoyed perusing kitschy objects. Mann remembers him as “one of the most urbane, sophisticated humans alive”, adding that “he taught me a lot. He was so loose and free and energetic” (several of her portraits of Twombly were collected in the book Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington (2016)).
In the early 2000s, Mann turned her attentions to the theme of death. For her 2001 “Body Farm” series, Mann had joined students at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility which housed a large fenced-off wooded area where recently deceased human remains – hence “Body Farm” – were placed in scenarios meant to replicate real homicide scenes. Many of Mann’s “Body Farm” images appeared in her 2003 book, What Remains, which includes other images focused on the theme of death, including photographs taken in-and-around her own Lexington farmstead (such as the decomposing body of her pert greyhound, Eva).
From the late 1990s, Mann had been experimenting with the glass negative and wet plate collodion process that was pioneered as far back as the 1850s. The technique involves coating a glass plate with a syrupy substance (collodion) and washing it in a light-sensitive solution of silver salts. Mann employed this process, which gives the image a mysterious, vintage quality, in her series of the landscapes of the American South, Last Measures (2003) and Deep South (2005). Of the Deep South series, Mann had returned to the sites of civil war battles and photographed the landscapes as they exist now. As art historian James Christen Steward explains, this series “explores how mass death turns ordinary landscape into hallowed ground, asking us to look at landscape in new ways and to question how art affects our sense of landscape, of place, of history”. Mann added that, “These photographs are about memory and time and the still point at which they intersect. […] for me, making these images was a dizzying, time-unraveling spiral into the radical light of the South […] I noted the ways we compose history’s beautiful lie”.
Mann had also started exploring alternative ways of working with the collodion process. She experimented with ambrotypes and tintypes which are underexposed collodion plates that produce as positive images set against a black background. The former is formed when the glass plate is tinted and coated with lacquer on one side; the latter (exemplified in such works as Untitled (Self-Portrait) (2012)) is rendered on a thin sheet of black-lacquered metal rather than glass. Given that the ambrotypes and tintypes are made on glass or metal (rather than being reproduced infinitum from negatives) they have a unique “one-off” status (not dissimilar to the plates produced under the original daguerreotype process).
In 2009 Mann published her book, Proud Flesh. It was the outcome of a six-year project in which Mann had documented, using the collodion process, her husband’s journey with his muscle wasting disease. Mann said of her husband, “Almost the first thing I did after I met Larry Mann in 1969 was to photograph him, and I haven’t stopped since. At our age, past the prime of life, we are given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark stoicism, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. In recent years, when many of his major muscles have withered, he has allowed me to take pictures of his body that make me squirm with embarrassment for him […] It is a testament to Larry’s tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures”.
Mann is passionate about horses: “When I ride, especially the fast-flowing-as-one with the galloping horse on the mountain trails […] I feel a freedom like no other. It’s basic and primitive and in no way relates to the life of my mind or of my aesthetic sensibility”. However, in 2006, she suffered a serious injury when her Arabian horse suffered an aneurysm while she was riding him, and in the tumult, she was dismounted. The stricken horse then fell on top of Mann, breaking her back. She spent the next two years in recovery, during which time she produced several ambrotype self-portraits. A second film, (this time feature length), What Remains, was an Emmy Award nominee in the 2008 Best Documentary category and the Jury Award winner at the Atlanta film festival in the same year.
In 2011, Mann presented a lecture series titled “If Memory Serves” for the William E. Massey, Sr. Lecture in the History of American Civilization, and worked on her memoir, Hold Still, which was published in 2015. The book became a New York Times bestseller and won the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. But tragedy struck the Mann family again in the same year when (her son) Emmett took his own life. Mann spent several months at home in a state of shock.
Since then, Mann has made great strides in processing her grief, and returned to work, most recently exploring issues related to race relations and the history of slavery in the American South. She and Larry still live in Lexington (in the home they built together on her family’s farm). Art critic Richard B. Woodward, who has visited the Mann household, writes, “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”. In 2020 Mann was recipient of The Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society (UK) “in recognition of a sustained and significant contribution to the art of photography”.
The Legacy of Sally Mann
Art critic Richard B. Woodward states that “[Mann’s] work embodies several antithetical trends in contemporary photography. By locating her material in the lives of her own family, Mann belongs among the confessional documentarians, like Tina Barney and Larry Sultan. But the construction of her photographs as fiction rather than fact, with a moody narrative linking the images, puts her in a camp with Cindy Sherman and the post-modernists. And finally, the antique look of the prints – the vignetting, shallow depth of field, blurred edges and general languor – connects her to neo-pictorialists like Bruce Weber and the Starns. Like them, she depends as much on evocation as description”.
The controversy surrounding her pictures of naked and semi-naked children placed her at the center of discussions regarding art and indecency, concurrent with the so-called “culture wars” of the 1990s, and subsequent legal cases that have targeted the photographer Jock Sturges (whose images of naked children on a nude beach in France were confiscated by the F.B.I. in 1990), and artists such as Andres Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose works have all been condemned as obscene and/or sacrilegious by conservative and religious groups. But writing in Time magazine, Reynolds Price was clear eyed enough to look beyond the controversies: “Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann’s steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance, and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise – subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love”.