Sally Mann

BIOGRAPHY

Sally Mann is one of the most significant American photographers of the late 20th and 21st centuries, known for her psychologically rich, formally daring images rooted in the cultural and physical landscape of the American South. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Mann has explored enduring themes of childhood, family, memory, mortality, and the passage of time, often through experimental and historic photographic processes.

Mann’s relationship with Edwynn Houk Gallery began with the debut of her celebrated series At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), a nuanced study of girls on the cusp of adolescence. These black-and-white portraits introduced her signature combination of technical precision, emotional honesty, and Southern sensibility. Since this presentation, Edwynn Houk Gallery has continued to present key series by the artist, Immediate Family, Mother Land, and Deep South and actively facilitates secondary market placements of sold-out works.

Her landmark series, Immediate Family (1985–1994), presents deeply intimate, occasionally staged photographs of her three children—Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia—taken at the family’s remote cabin in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Using an 8×10 view camera, Mann created unflinching images that capture both the immediacy and complexity of childhood: play, solitude, conflict, and transformation. “Every mother has seen everything I’ve photographed,” Mann has said, “probably countless times.” This series was first exhibited at Edwynn Houk Gallery in Chicago in 1990, with the New York presentation bringing national recognition and a 1992 cover story in The New York Times Magazine.

As her children matured, Mann turned her lens toward the land itself, using the American South as a site of both personal and collective memory. Her projects Deep South, Mother Land, and Last Measure trace landscapes marked by history, trauma, and reverence. From the battlefields of the Civil War to quiet backroads in Virginia and Mississippi, her photographs reflect on the legacy of place and the weight of memory.

Mann embraced the 19th-century wet-plate collodion process for many of these works—a labor-intensive technique whose imperfections mirror the fragility of the histories she explores. The resulting images are ghostly and tactile, with surface flaws that underscore the haunted, physical presence of the past.

institutions & RECOGNITION

Mann's work is held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Mann is a Guggenheim Fellow and a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. In 2018, Mann was honored with the mid-career retrospective Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum. The show traveled through 2020 to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Mann is also the subject of two major documentary films: Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (1994), nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received an Emmy nomination. Her memoir, Hold Still (2015), was a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

In 2025, she will publish a new book of photographs titled Art Work: On the Creative Life, continuing her exploration of the Southern landscape and its emotional topography.

Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia.