Sally Mann

Sally Mann’s poetic and psychologically charged photographs explore enduring themes of the human condition: family, nature, desire, mortality, and memory. Over more than four decades, her work has remained rooted in the landscape and cultural complexity of the American South and is distinguished by her experimental, often deliberately imperfect approach to large-format and historic photographic processes.

Mann’s relationship with Edwynn Houk Gallery began with the debut of her series At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), a nuanced study of girls on the threshold of adolescence. Her most iconic body of work, Immediate Family (1985–94), features intimate and occasionally staged images of her children—Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia—at the family’s cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. Shot with an 8×10 camera, these photographs capture the immediacy of childhood experience: play, conflict, solitude, and transformation. “Every mother has seen everything I’ve photographed,” Mann said, “probably countless times.” Immediate Family was first exhibited at Edwynn Houk Gallery in Chicago in 1990, and received national attention following the gallery’s New York presentation and a 1992 cover story in The New York Times Magazine.

As her children aged, Mann shifted her lens outward, turning to the Southern landscape as a site of both personal and historical memory. From Virginia to Mississippi, she documented terrains marked by war, trauma, and resilience. Her embrace of the wet-plate collodion process—a 19th-century technique dating back to the Civil War—created images that feel both timeless and fragile, visually echoing the histories they evoke.

Edwynn Houk Gallery continues to represent Mann and has played a central role in debuting several of her major series, including Mother Land and Deep South. The gallery exclusively represented Immediate Family and now offers select works through the secondary market.

Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Emmy. Her memoir, Hold Still (2015), was a finalist for the National Book Awards and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. In 2018, Mann was honored with a major mid-career retrospective, A Thousand Crossings, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum. The exhibition traveled through 2020 to the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. In 2025, Mann will release a new book of photographs, Art Work: On the Creative Life, continuing her exploration of the Southern landscape and the emotional terrain it holds.