Sally Mann

Sally Mann, neé Sally Munger, American photographer whose powerful images of childhood, sexuality, and death were often deemed controversial.

Mann was introduced to photography by her father, Robert Munger, a physician who photographed her nude as a girl. In 1969, as a teenager, she took up photography in Vermont at the Putney School and then spent two years at Bennington College, where she studied with photographer Norman Sieff and met and proposed to the man who became her husband, Larry Mann. After spending a year in Europe, she graduated (1974) summa cum laude from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia, and a year later she earned a master’s degree in writing.

In 1983, using her century-old 8 × 10-inch view camera, Mann started photographing 12-year-old girls. That series was showcased in her 1988 book, At Twelve. Another series, “Dream Sequence,” explored the psychology of relationships.

Mann first found herself mired in controversy after her series of black-and-white portraits, entitled “Immediate Family,” was unveiled in the spring of 1992 at Houk Friedman, a gallery in New York City. Those photographs created a stir because they focused on her three children, who often appeared nude and in postures, situations, and settings that some viewers found disturbing. Some questioned whether Mann had exploited her children, while others debated whether the images constituted a variety of child pornography. Still others lavishly praised the collection as an honest exploration of the complexities of childhood. In "Damaged Child", one of Mann’s earliest portraits in the series (begun in 1984), her eldest daughter, Jessie, appears with a swollen eye and an expression seething with recrimination, a look some interpreted as belonging to a victim of child abuse. In truth, Jessie had been bitten by a gnat. Another Mann portrait shows her oldest child, Emmett, with melted Popsicle smearing his genitals. Yet another shot depicts her youngest daughter, Virginia, sleeping nude on a urine-stained mattress with her legs flung apart.

In the introduction to her book Immediate Family, Mann wrote that “many of these pictures are intimate…but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry.” With these staged visual explorations, Mann captured some of the darker images of childhood and raised some thought-provoking issues. She was hailed for her painstaking technique, which involved mentally sketching each photograph and discarding dozens of shots before extensively labouring in the darkroom to achieve the desired effect. In the fall of 1993, Sally Mann: Still Time, a 60-print photographic retrospective covering 20 years of Mann’s work, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.