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Sally Mann: Vinculum | Artist Spotlight | Gagosian

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Reading from “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs” by Sally Mann

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Sally Mann | Art21 | Preview from Season 1 of "Art in the Twenty-First Century" (2001)

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Sally Mann's early "Immediate Family" photographs were of her three children and husband. In her more recent series of landscapes of the deep South, Mann uses damaged lenses to make images marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process as it developed during the 19th century.

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Sally Mann: Collodion and the Angel of Uncertainty

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Photographer Sally Mann shares life behind iconic images

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West Building, Ground Floor

This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.
For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born 1951) has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work is that it is all bred of a place, the American South. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Mann has long written about what it means to live in the South and be identified as a southerner. Using her deep love of her native land and her knowledge of its fraught history, she asks provocative questions-about history, identity, race, and religion-that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings considers how Mann's relationship with this land has shaped her work and how the legacy of the South-as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground-continues to permeate American identity.

Organized into five sections-Family, The Land, Last Measure, Abide with Me, and What Remains-and including many works not previously published or publicly shown, the exhibition is the first major survey of the artist's work to travel internationally. Featuring some 110 photographs, the exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Sarah Kennel, the Byrne Family Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Sponsors: The exhibition is supported by a generous grant from the Trellis Fund.

Additional support is provided by Sally Engelhard Pingree and The Charles Engelhard Foundation.

Passes: Admission is always free and passes are not required

Other venues: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, June 30-September 23, 2018
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, November 16, 2018-February 10, 2019
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 3-May 27, 2019
Jeu de Paume, Paris, June 17-September 22, 2019
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, October 19-December 16, 2019

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West Building, Ground Floor This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery. For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born 1951) has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor.

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There is a sense of immutable, eternal life. And in these new works there is a sense about Cy's own continuum-the ongoing quality of his great legacy and his art-it's not a memorialization, it's a living thing.
-Sally Mann

Gagosian is pleased to present Remembered Light, an exhibition of color and black-and-white photographs by Sally Mann, taken between 1999 and 2012.

Mann is regarded for her images of intimate and familiar subjects rendered sublime and disquieting: children, landscapes, family, and the nature of mortality. In previous projects, she explored relationships between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, nature and history. In her latest exhibition of photographs spanning more than a decade, she records in fleeting impressions the working habitat of the late Cy Twombly, her close friend and mentor.

Twombly and Mann are both natives of Virginia. The landscape to which Twombly returned each year is also the memoryscape of Mann's connection to him. This was documented in her recent and celebrated memoir Hold Still, in which she recalls his elemental nature, his southern courtesy, and his wry and gentle humor. Recalling her time with Twombly, Mann writes, "Our part of the South, remote, beautiful, and patinaed with the past, allows us such a remove, the distance of another time."

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Sally Mann: Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, September 22-October 29, 2016 | Gagosian

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There is a sense of immutable, eternal life. And in these new works there is a sense about Cy's own continuum-the ongoing quality of his great legacy and his art-it's not a memorialization, it's a living thing. -Sally Mann Gagosian is pleased to present Remembered Light, an exhibition of color and black-and-white photographs by Sally Mann, taken between 1999 and 2012.

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1 About a year after seeing it at its first home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, I had the pleasure of seeing the Sally Mann exhibit "A Thousand Crossings" at Paris's Musée du Jeu de Paume in July 2019. An artist myself (musician) with very deep Southern roots (13 generation South Carolinian), I have been rattled by Mann's work since I first saw it. The images felt familiar, relevant, giving me a sense of . Seeing them at the Jeu de Paume was even more surreal, a ringing reminder of home in the center of Paris.

(1) Deep South, Untitled (Fontainebleau), 1998, Sally Mann

Sally Mann/National Gallery of Art, Washington (All Rights Reserved)

3 Looking at these different phases of her photographs of the land that nourished her and shaped her, the "Southern-ness" of Mann's work is one of the most conspicuous ribbons that run through it. But what about it is particularly Southern? And why is it relevant in France?

It's not that we Southerners are exactly in love with death, but there is no question that, given our history, we're on a first-name basis with it. And such familiarity often lends Southern art a tinge of sorrow, of finitude and mourning. Think of the blues, for example, or early jazz; think of Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor [...]." (Mann 82)

6 It's true: Southerners are, by nature, fixated on their past, and the complicated, dark history we share: of slavery; of the degradation of Southerners after a bitter defeat; of the aftermath of a cruel societal system that came crumbling down, leaving torn vestiges of an impoverished land and people in its wake; and of our forebears, black and white alike, who doggedly clung to this place and forged their lives here. The land is veritably howling with this history. Mann believes, as many Southerners do, that this legacy and these voices are seeping up through the ground. Take, for example, "Deep South, Untitled (#9)," which depicts the ruins of the Windsor Mansion, a Greek revival Mississippi property built by slave labor ("National Register of Historic Places"). The timeless image with its blurred edges is a living allegory of the downfall of this system and what it left behind.

7 Mann's photographs of the Southern landscape-in several iterations: her journeys through the Deep South in the "The Land" section, her battlefields series in "Last Measure," and her swamp series in "Abide With Me"-make up an essential part of the exhibit. As she turned her focus away from her family and toward the land, she set out from her home in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on trips deeper south to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in her Suburban, which, more often than not, doubled as her hotel and (full of "esoteric and explosive chemicals") her darkroom.

(3) Sally Mann's mobile darkroom

From (229), Courtesy Kim Rushing (All Rights Reserved)

8 She was looking to this land, through her waiting lens, to reveal the scars of its past. "For me," she writes, "the Deep South was haunted by the souls of the millions of African Americans who built that part of the country with their hands and with the sweat and blood of their backs. I was moving among shades, aware, always, of their presence" (Mann 234).

9 A story that has haunted her since childhood is that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago who was kidnapped and murdered near Money, Mississippi, in 1955 for allegedly making a pass at a white woman. Till's beaten, naked body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River, tethered to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral so that his ruined body could be seen by all, a testament to the injustice. Mann named her first-born child for him.

10 There is a series of photos in the exhibit through which Mann makes a sort of memorial to the murdered Till. Led by a local friend, she moved along the Tallahatchie, tracing the sites of his last hours. One of these photos, "Deep South, Untitled (Bridge on Tallahatchie)," is a view of the Black Bayou Bridge in Glendora, Mississippi, the site where his body was thrown into the river. The photo depicts a typical rural Southern scene: rickety old bridge, muddy river overhung with brush. Yet there is something truly unnerving about it: a hand-like branch reaches into the picture, with off-shooting smaller branches reminiscent of curling, grasping fingers. The river from which his body was pulled is vignetted, crowded on either side by dark trees, losing focus as the eye goes outward, while on the bottom left of the image appear marks created by the development process, chemical specks moving out from a long drip, resembling tears, or blood.

12 "A Thousand Crossings" explores this concept of the interplay between land and memory once again in Mann's battlefields series, begun in the early 2000s. In these photos, which appear in the section of the exhibit entitled "Last Measure," Mann photographed sites of some of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War: Antietam (the bloodiest in American history), Manassas, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, and the Wilderness. Through these photographs, Mann asks "Does the earth remember? Do these fields, upon which unspeakable carnage occurred, where unknowable numbers of bodies are buried, bear witness in some way?" (Mann 411).

13 These pictures are the most striking in the exhibit. Though most of them were shot in the blaring afternoon sun, the negatives were developed in a way that makes them very dark and softly focused, the skies swirling, simmering, rippling in places. She shot them close to the ground in an attempt to capture the view of a dying soldier, felled in one of these battles, absorbing with his remaining senses his surroundings in the midst of enormous destruction and loss of human life. The plots of land where these battles took place, today ordinary, green, and peopled by tourists, become through Mann's lens dark, alarming, and cataclysmic, visions almost apocalyptic in nature. "She believed," says Dr. Greenough, "[...] that the only way to connect the latent energy that lingers in a site charged with historical suffering was through an act of imagination and fiction" (Greenough 0:28).

15 In "Battlefields, Antietam (Black Sun)," "Battlefields, Antietam (Cornfield)," and "Battlefields, Fredericksburg (Cedar Trees)," the collodion formed in a way on the surface to suggest fire or smoke. In "Battlefields, Antietam (Starry Night)," light spots across the image look like bullet holes; in "Battlefields, Cold Harbor (Battle)," short, thin fading lines across the image seem to suggest flying bullets. Tears in the emulsion and imperfections in the antique glass used to make the negatives give the viewer the sense that these images have been pulled from time, from memory. The chaotic darkness and nebulousness of them remove you from the middle of a sunny field, where your car is nearby and you are safely reading a plaque about the hideous Battle of Antietam, and place you right in the middle of the horror.

16 In her writing, Mann has borrowed the statement from her friend, Canadian novelist Niall Mackenzie, that "we Southern artists [...] display a conspicuous willingness to use doses of romanticism that would be fatal to anyone else" (Mann 240). Southerners are predisposed to this romanticism, sentimentality, even mysticism. It stems from an idea that our surroundings are alive with the past, electric with the energies of those who came before. Not in a ghostly way (though we love a good ghost story), but, as Mann might put it, in a "metaphorically resonant" way.

17 True to her roots, Mann was guided by these particularly Southern principles as she moved through the landscapes, through the decades. She was determined to make the land "give up its ghosts." And the ghosts are there, visible in these images. The land does indeed carry these scars, as does the collective Southern memory. Those who share that past live among its relics, both material and societal.

18 Another facet of her work that is uniquely derivative of Mann's Southern identity is her lifelong grappling with exactly that. How do you reconcile your blood-quickening love of a place, a place where you absolutely belong, with its painful history? And how can you come to terms with the part you and your people played in it?

20 In this part of "Abide With Me," Mann examines the unasked questions, her own obliviousness of the world around her in the Virginia of her youth, a world alive with what she calls "the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private" (Mann 243).

22 The exhibit includes photos Mann took of Carter in the late 1980s and early 90s, including a few of Carter with Mann's young daughter Virginia, who was named after Carter. The images have a poignant tenderness to them, particularly "The Two Virginias #4," taken from above as the two are napping, both of their hands raised skyward, a delicate light on the older Virginia's white hair and arthritic hands, and young Virginia's face. In the context of "Abide With Me," these photos are odes to Carter's quiet dignity, strength, and perseverance in the face of the pain and toil in a place and time fundamentally inhospitable to her. Through Mann's lens, this often takes shape in her focus on Carter's immense physicality-strong, capable, and proud. She has, since childhood, had a fascination with Carter's size 13 feet. This is visible in "The Two Virginias #3," where young Virginia sits on Carter's lap, her tiny feet dangling above Carter's massive, nearly 100-year-old feet. We see this physicality again in "The Two Virginias #1," where the young Virginia rests against the powerful leg of her elderly namesake, Carter's hand, long-nailed and weathered by age, resting on the child's head.

23 How does "A Thousand Crossings" translate across continents? Why is it relevant in France? Firstly, Jeu de Paume, as an institution, is a champion of American photography and has endeavored consistently to bring it to a French audience. The work of Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Vivian Maier, and Diane Arbus, among a slew of others, have all been part of the programming over the past years. Presumably, one of the reasons for this is to help people understand the American experience. Visiting the Dorothea Lange exhibit at the Jeu de Paume last year offered me a startling new perspective on WWII-era Japanese internment camps, thanks to the showcase on her work for the War Relocation Authority. We can read about the history of place or spend time there, but art holds the key to the heart of a culture, and photography is such an immediate and evocative medium. In an (easily accessible) instant, we are transported, intimate details are revealed to us, and the feel of moments and movements are accessible in a way they are not through prose or even sound.

The thing about that South is that it retains for Europeans a trace of cultural familiarity, as the rest of the country does not. [...] Class system, yes; history, yes; but more important, I suspect, is the lingering aftermath of defeat. Europe is a continent of defeated nations. [...] America has never known the tread of occupation, the return of beaten men. The South is the exception. Pain is a dimension of old civilizations. The South has it. The rest of the United States does not. (Mann 81)

The blast of battle is still present in this courtyard; you can still see its horrors; the violence of the conflict has been fossilized here; there's life here, there's death here; it happened only yesterday. The walls are still in their final throes, the stones are falling, the breaches are howling, the holes are gaping wounds; the trees hang down and shudder, and seem to be trying to get away. (Hugo 330)

Hugo would agree with Mann that the land does, indeed, remember.

26 When I first saw "A Thousand Crossings" in its entirety, I felt tenderness for her children, immense sorrow for all the suffering that has taken place in our land, impressed with the beauty of the landscapes, familiar as I am, as a native of the South Carolina Lowcountry, with the "radical light of the South" and its "profligate physical beauty," to which Mann has often referred. The aesthetic felt like an embodiment of something elusive and unnamable that I am always seeking in art-my own and that of others. That exquisite clash of darkness and light, lingering mysticism rooted in historical conflict, a palpable search for transcendence. This imperfect land, beautiful and harsh, difficult and tender, rife with contradictions, is perhaps my own muse as well. "I weep for the great heart of the South," Mann writes, "the flawed human heart" (Mann 228). So do I. And so now do many Jeu de Paume visitors, I imagine.

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Sally Mann's "A Thousand Crossings" at the Musée du Jeu de Paume

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About a year after seeing it at its first home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, I had the pleasure of seeing the Sally Mann exhibit "A Thousand Crossings" at Paris's Musée du Jeu de Paume in July 2019.

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Sally Mann: Photographs and Poetry, Limited Edition 21st Platinum Edition by Sally MANN, John, WOOD on Vincent Borrelli, Bookseller

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South Dennis, Massachusetts: 21st Editions -- Steven Albahari, 2005 1st Edition. Hardcover. Please inquire about pricing.First edition, first and only printing. Magnificent Platinum Limited Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies this being copy number 72 and 10 lettered copies.

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Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (The National Gallery of Art & Abrams Books, 2018) Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington (Gagosian & Abrams Books, 2016) Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015) Southern Landscape (21st Editions, 2013) The Flesh and The Spirit (Aperture, 2010) Proud Flesh (Gagosian & Aperture, 2009) Sally Mann (Faces) (Gagosian, 2006) Sally Mann: Photographs and Poetry (21st Editions, 2005) Deep South (Bulfinch, 2005) What Remains (Bulfinch, 2003) Still Time (Aperture, 1994) Immediate Family (Aperture, 1992) At Twelve (Aperture, 1988)

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Born in 1951 in Lexington (Virginia), Sally Mann naturally grew to admire the hilly landscapes and their rich traditions linked to their complex and inevitably charged history. While she briefly attended Bennington College in Vermont, she always remained close to her roots in Virginia, finishing both her BA in Literature from Hollins College in 1974 and her MA in Creative Writing the subsequent year. After a few photo publications in the '80s, she officially gained recognition with her intimate photos of her family, published under the title Immediate Family in 1992, which were described as "(...) nuanced and multifaceted pictures of childhood, one that addresses both from the adult and the child's point of view", by Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

It was a publication that not only gave her the title as an acclaimed artist, but also stirred up the media, which blamed her for exploiting her children because several of the photos showcased them nude. She, herself, saw her work as collaborations with her children, as the pictures, most of the time, actually were staged to some extent: "I never separated myself as an artist and a mother", she told The New York Times in 2016. Mann is part of a generation of photographers who experimented with the directorial picture by questioning the documentary and the fictional by subjectively (in collaboration with her kids) reenacting moments they already had experienced.

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings opens up in these more recognizable intimate moments, rich in complexity and exploring the relationship between family, nature and the freedom that they were provided with, taken at their remote summer cabin in Virginia in the late '80s. Divided in five sections - Family, The Land, Last Measure, Abide with Me and What Remains -, the exhibition continues by moving from the human intimacy to the search of a more profound intimacy with her homeland of the American South.

In The Land, a series of photographs from the '90s, she travels through several southern states in hopes of capturing the 'the radical light of the American South' and of finding the underlying moments of history left in the ruins and landscapes. The result was a set of dark photos of disappearing landscapes that show how she tells their past battles, which she emphasized with experimental printing techniques that enhanced both physical and symbolic flaws in the images.

Mann's understanding of the southern history is closely linked to the presence of her family's housemaid, Virginia 'Gee-Gee' Carter, who taught her about "the charged nature of race relations in the south." Among early African-American churches, displayed as monumental reminders of the incessant past, we're introduced to this woman of influence as well as intimate, emotive portraits of African-American men.

Finally, she illuminates the nature of mortality in her last telling as she goes back to her previous fascination for decay (What Remains, 2003), with a series of photographs of her family and herself: the distant faces of her children, her husband's dystrophy, or self-portraits after a serious riding accident. These photos depict time and transformation through the deterioration of photographs in relation to the decay of the body.

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Born in 1951 in Lexington (Virginia), Sally Mann naturally grew to admire the hilly landscapes and their rich traditions linked to their complex and inevitably charged history. While she briefly attended Bennington College in Vermont, she always remained close to her roots in Virginia, finishing both her BA in Literature from Hollins College in 1974 and her MA in Creative Writing the subsequent year.

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Sally Mann At Twelve 13-09-2012 / 17-11-2012 Sally Mann La Galería La Fábrica presenta por primera vez la serie completa At Twelve de la artista norteamericana Sally

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Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings [Greenough, Sarah, Kennel, Sarah, Mann, Sally, Als, Hilton, Daniel, Malcolm, Faust, Drew Gilpin, National Gallery of Art, Peabody Essex Museum] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings

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The artists Cy Twombly and Sally Mann may at first seem an unlikely pairing. He was a leading contemporary artist who defied easy categorization, a painter and sculptor whose enigmatic work often referenced mythology and epic poetry. She is a photographer with an uncanny ability to tap raw human emotion, whether depicting members of her family or the landscape of the American South. What they had in common was place-both grew up in rural Lexington, Virginia, where Twombly kept a studio and produced some of his most important work until his death in 2011, and where Mann has lived and worked all her life. Over the course of several years, Mann photographed inside Twombly's studio: the paint splatters on the floor and walls, the works in progress, the sculptures as they caught the raking rays of light passing through Venetian blinds, the progression from order to chaos that so often characterizes an artist's working place. The result is a rare insider's view of Twombly's process-we sense him in the room at every turn, although he is always just beyond the frame-and a poetic dialogue between two artistic visions.

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Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington

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The artists Cy Twombly and Sally Mann may at first seem an unlikely pairing. He was a leading contemporary artist who defied easy categorization, a painter and sculptor whose enigmatic work often referenced mythology and epic poetry. She is a photographer

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21st Editions is unique to the history of photography. It represents the intersection created between the classically processed photographic image, prose, poetry, and the fine-press book that began with the great English designer, artist, poet and publisher, William Morris, and his Kelmscott Press's

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PUBLISHER
Aperture/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.5 x 12 in. / 204 pgs / 225 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/30/2010
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
Contact Publisher

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781597111621 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CDN $65.00

AVAILABILITY
Not Available

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Richmond, VA
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 12/10

BROWSE THE 2022 MID WINTER CATALOG

Preview our Mid-Winter 2022 catalog, featuring new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.

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APERTURE/VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

Text by John Ravenal, David Levi Strauss, Anne Wilkes Tucker.

Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit is the first in-depth exploration of this world-renowned artist's approach to the body. Throughout her career, Mann has fearlessly pushed her exploration of the human form, tackling often difficult subject matter and making unapologetically sensual images that are simultaneously bold and lyrical. This beautifully produced publication includes Mann's earliest platinum prints from the late 1970s, Polaroid still lifes, early color work of her children, haunting landscape images, recent self-portraits and nude studies of her husband. These series document Mann's interest in the body as principal subject, with the associated issues of vulnerability and mortality lending an elegiac note to her images. In bringing them together, author and curator John Ravenal examines the varied ways in which Mann's experimental approach, including ambrotypes and gelatin-silver prints made from collodian wet-plate negatives, moves her subjects from the corporeal to the ethereal. Ravenal also supplies a comprehensive introduction as well as individual entries on each series, and essays by David Levi Strauss ("Eros, Psyche, and the Mendacity of Photography") and Anne Wilkes Tucker ("Living Memory") add different, but equally illuminating perspectives to this work. Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit is a must for any serious library of photographic literature, students, scholars, collectors and others interested in her work.
Sally Mann (born 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Mann's many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994) and Proud Flesh (2009). She lives in Lexington, Virginia.

Featured image is from Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit, published by Aperture with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

FROM THE BOOK

"Whether exploring the illuminations and shadows of childhood or those of storied Southern landscapes, Mann has let her eyes lead her, submitting to the limitations and glorying in the capacities of photography, and she knows, instinctively and professionally, that great images are often made on the border between these two, where the distinction blurs...Sally Mann's camera eye is unflinching and loving at the same time, and she insists that this is not a contradiction. To look and see directly and truthfully is to love, and vice versa. Everything she has ever done as a photographer and artist depends on this...In 2006, Sally Mann turned the camera on herself alone, and began to make hundreds of self-portraits--close-ups of her face and torso in ambrotypes. These images are relentlessly intimate, and at the same time, inscrutable...What is both disturbing and enlightening about Sally Mann's work is that it is so insistent in the resident terms of photography--the search for the trace of animate things, alive and dead--and that it moves back and forth between the dead and the living in a way that threatens the boundaries we take for granted, and that is unsanctioned and free. This is truly dangerous. That she continues to do this without injury is remarkable. Only love can offer that kind of protection. Only love."

David Levi Strauss, excerpted from his text to The Flesh and The Spirit.

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Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit is the first in-depth exploration of this world-renowned artist's approach to the body. Throughout her career, Mann has fearlessly pushed her exploration of the human form, tackling often difficult subject matter and making unapologetically sensual images that are simultaneously bold and lyrical.

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A stunning collection of tritone photographs reinvents the art of landscape photography that evokes the vintage images of the American South in works that utilize methods favored by nineteenth-century masters of the photographic art to capture visions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Virginia. 20,000 first printing.

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A stunning collection of tritone photographs reinvents the art of landscape photography that evokes the vintage images of the American South in works that utilize methods favored by nineteenth-century masters of the photographic art to capture visions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Virgi...

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What Remains [Mann, Sally] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. What Remains

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Photographs by Sally Mann. Contributions by C D Wright.

Sally Mann, born in Lexington, Virginia, is one of America s most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Her many books include "What Remains", "Deep South", and the Aperture titles "At Twelve", "Immediate Family", "Still Time", "Proud Flesh", and "The Flesh and the Spirit". A feature film about What Remains debuted to critical acclaim in 2006. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.
C.D. Wright has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including the recent volumes "One Big Self: An Investigation" and "Rising, Falling, Hovering," which received the Griffin Poetry Award. A MacArthur Fellow, Wright teaches at Brown University and lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

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Children, landscape, lovers-these subjects are almost as common to the photographic lexicon as light itself. But Sally Mann's take on these iconic themes, rendered through both traditional and esoteric processes, is anything but common. Astonishingly original both in imagery and technique, Mann's work consistently challenges the viewer: in her hands, experiences drawn from daily life...

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Close Window · Purchase Book

What Remains Photographs by Sally Mann.

All photographs © copyright by their respective photographer and/or publisher
BookTease™ images are © copyright photo-eye, All Rights Reserved and may not be copied without permission from photo-eye.

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Close Window · Purchase Book What Remains Photographs by Sally Mann. All photographs © copyright by their respective photographer and/or publisherBookTease™ images are © copyright photo-eye, All Rights Reserved and may not be copied without permission from photo-eye.

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Photographs by Sally Mann. Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, 1997. 56 pp., numerous tritone and quadratone illustrations, 13¼X12½".
Out of Print. As New condition. Signed by Sally Mann.
PLEASE NOTE: photo-eye has a very limited number of out-of-print copies available. Orders will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Acclaimed for the large-format portraits of her now grown children, Sally Mann then began focusing exclusively on the landscape of Virginia and Georgia. These images possess all of the grandeur and complexity of her earlier images, but reveal an inspired attention to the history of Southern imagery. A brilliant new beginning.

Printing by Meridian, East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

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photo-eye Bookstore | Mother Land by Sally Mann | photobook

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Photographs by Sally Mann . Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, 1997. 56 pp., numerous tritone and quadratone illustrations, 13¼X12½". Out of Print. As New condition. Signed by Sally Mann. PLEASE NOTE: photo-eye has a very limited number of out-of-print copies available. Orders will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

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Photographs by Sally Mann. Text by Sally Mann.

Sally Mann is one of America's most renowned photographers. Her work has been exhibited around the world and is held by such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. She has received numerous honors, including a doctorate from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C., and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

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Expanded from an earlier catalogue of the same title, "Still Time" accompanied a traveling exhibition featuring more than 20 years of Sally Mann's photography."Still Time" celebrates an artist whose acute perceptions and imagination embrace not only the photographs of children for which she is renowned, but also earlier landscapes, and the unexpected, compelling forays into...

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"At Twelve" is a composite portrait that is both universal and intimately personal. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction, "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."

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Sally Mann nació en Lexington, Virginia, en 1951. Es una fotógrafa que utiliza los diferentes recursos fotográficos para contar su historia, siempre con una cámara de gran formato y la técnica de colidón húmedo. Veremos como en su trabajo utiliza la metáfora, pero también la fotografía documental, es capaz de producir un trabajo absolutamente profundo, melancólico y luego abstraerse para contar una historia desde un tono neutral, sin añadir ni un ápice de emoción.

Es complicado clasificar el trabajo de Mann, podríamos decir que pertenece al grupo de fotógrafos documentales como Tina Barney o Diane Arbus pero se nos quedarían fuera aquellas las preparadas y pensadas, las que cuentan con una narrativa ficticia, tampoco entrarían en el saco documental las que pese a contar una historia real podrían clasificarse por su estética más que por su técnica. Pero lo triste es que Sally Mann ya tiene una etiqueta que pende sobre ella, como "la que fotografió a sus hijas desnudas".

Sally Mann creció en un ambiente artístico y liberal pero religioso y moralista en el sur de EE.UU. Mann comenzó a fotografiar a finales de la década de los 60 en el Instituto la vida cotidiana en Virginia.

Estudió fotografía en Prastgaard Film School, Aegean School of Fine Arts, Apearon y en el Seminario Ansel Adams en Yosemite.

Sally Mann primeros pasos

En sus inicios Mann se dedicó a la fotografía de paisaje en las que ya puede apreciarse su particular forma de mirar, su extraordinaria manera de componer y que reflejan ya un trabajo pausado y elaborado.

No tuvo que esperar mucho para comprobar que iba por el buen camino, su primera exposición individual en la "Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.", en 1977, fue también el primer trabajo por el que le pagaron, consistía en un trabajo documental sobre la construcción de la nueva Biblioteca de Derecho Lewis School.

Su segundo trabajo fue por el que se dio a conocer mundialmente y por el que la "doble-moralista" sociedad americana le colocó la espada de damocles. At twelve fue realizado entre 1983 y 1985 y publicado en 1988, en este trabajo rinde un homenaje a la metamorfosis a la que las niñas tienen que enfrentarse en su viaje hacia la edad adulta.

En este trabajo, la fotógrafa retrata a una serie de niñas que viven cerca de su casa en Lexington, Virginia. 35 potentes fotografías llenas de metáforas, como la que habla de la virginidad representada en un árbol sobre el que se apoyan dos adolecentes,

y otras con un discurso directo y descarado, ambos discursos ejemplifican perfectamente el universo adolescente.

¡¡A la hoguera!!

Entre 1984 and 1994 Mann trabaja un nuevo proyecto con el que dinamitará los débiles puentes que la unían con los críticos más moralistas, con el público más tradicional y con la opinión pública más retrógrada.

Immediate Family cuenta la historia de una vida, de su vida. Con una mirada honesta decide hacer un trabajo sobre la intimidad, sobre el día a día, sobre su familia.

Pero aquellos a quienes los árboles le impiden ver el bosque comenzaron una campaña que abarcó desde la censura a su trabajo hasta las críticas más absurdas, hay quien tachó su trabajo de pedófilo por mostrar la desnudez con la naturalidad y la inocencia con la que la hace un niño.

En 1991 el Wall Street Journal decidió hablar sobre el trabajo de Mann, ilustró el trabajo con una imagen Virginia, la hija de la fotógrafa que por entonces tenía cuatro años, pero tapándole los ojos y aquellos elementos de sus sexualidad que los editores consideraron inmorales: el desnudo torso y la vagina. La misma niña escribió al periódico una nota en la que decía: "Querido señor, no me gusta la manera en la que me ha tachado"

Sus hijos crecieron y cada vez se encontraban más incómodos con las fotos y los desnudos, esto le dio a Mann la oportunidad de volver sobre sus pasos, de redescubrirse e invertir tiempo de nuevo en los paisajes y en explorar en otros conceptos fotográficos.

En 1994 publica su trabajo más conceptual, íntimista y surrealista, Still Time, ya que no solo incluye fotografías de su familia, sino que recupera fotografías hechas en sus primeras etapas, momentos, de detalles, paisajes. Puede decirse que este libro, sin ser el más conocido, marca un punto de inflexión, un tránsito.

Ha producido dos grandes series de paisajes, Mother Land en, 2003, donde la técnica de colodión húmedo da más fuerza al mensaje. Mathew Brady utilizó esa misma técnica en sus series de la guerra civil dónde se veían soldados que habían perdido la vida en el campo de batalla, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, también con el mismo proceso, representó en la misma época que Brady escenas de paisajes. Mann debió estudiar a ambos y creó unas imágenes de los paisajes donde tuvieron lugar algunas de las batallas que rememoran a aquellas.

Para acercarse al proceso fotográfico que se desarrolló durante el siglo XIX, Mann utiliza objetivos dañados y una cámara que requiere que la fotógrafa utilice su mano como un obturador, estas fotografías están marcados por los arañazos, fugas de luz, y los cambios de enfoque a menudo fortuitos.

El otro trabajo que desarrolló fue Deep South en 2005, que puede considerarse la transición entre su época paisajista y la que vendrá después. El denominador común en el trabajo de Mann no es otro que la vida, desde la naturaleza de los paisajes hasta la muerte pasando por la manera en que crecemos y nos enfrentamos a ella. Si Mother Land nos llevaba a paisajes de los campos de batalla de la guerra civil, Deep South podría contar la historia de Emmett Louis Till, un adolescente negro de catorce años que en 1955 fue a visitar a su madre a un pueblecito cerca del Mississippi, donde murió asesinado víctima del racismo, ya que recorre los parajes cercanos al gran río e invita a la reflexión sobre lo que seguramente pudo pasar en muchos de los parajes que nos presenta.

Tras los reflexivos paisajes experimenta con imágenes que reflexionan en torno a la muerte como una fase de la vida, la muerte como un proceso tan natural como inevitable y tan impredecible como cualquier otra etapa de la vida. Whats remains, publicado en 2003, muestra fotografías de los restos de su galgo muerto y cuerpos en descomposición, Mann destacó que esta colección ha profundizado su estudio de la mortalidad, la decadencia y la muerte.

El final del camino

Como podemos comprobar el trabajo de Sally Mann no es lineal en el tiempo ya que se permite contar la historia de la vida en " flash back". Los primeros trabajos hablan de la niñez, de la transición que experimenta el ser humano hacia la etapa adulta, los miedos, las ilusiones, las pasiones y los deseos. Los siguientes hablan de la naturaleza, de la vida y de la muerte, del origen y el destino. El salto hacia la muerte debería ser el final del trabajo pero Mann aún tiene más que contarnos. En Proud Flesh Mann fotografió a su marido durante un período de seis años, de nuevo la familia, los desnudos y la intimidad forman parte de su discurso, si antes sirvieron para explicar el complejo salto de la niñez a la madurez, ahora los usará para contar en no menos complicado y doloroso proceso del paso de la vida a la muerte.

Su marido Larry está muy enfermo, con su ya tradicional técnica fotográfica Sally mantiene eterna las caricias al frágil y vulnerable cuerpo de su marido. La candidez y el respeto tanto por Larry como por el proceso vital de su muerte son extrañamente contrastan con la frialdaz con la que Mann debe enfrentarse a su trabajo, es quizá esta dicotomía la que hace de esta fotógrafa una maestra.

Sally Mann no será elegida para fotografiar a la Reina de Inglaterra en su cumpleaños, seguramente seguirán hablando de ella como la madre que vendió fotos de sus hijas desnudas, seguramente sus libros nunca cotizarán en el mercado de los "cientos de miles" de dólares. Será siempre una de las grandes, una de las mejores aportaciones al selecto club de Los fotógrafos malditos

Sally Mann from Alexander Joffre on Vimeo.

Foto de inicio | Liz Liguori

Web oficial | Sally Mann

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Sally Mann, la maestra que fotografía la vida sin censura

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Sally Mann nació en Lexington, Virginia, en 1951. Es una fotógrafa que utiliza los diferentes recursos fotográficos para contar su historia, siempre con una cámara de gran formato y la técnica de colidón húmedo.