Short-listed for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards

For more than 40 years, Sally Mann (b. 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 endeavour. What unites this broad body of work — portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies — is that it is all “bred of a place,” the American South. Mann, who is a native of Lexington, Virginia, uses her deep love of her homeland and her knowledge of its historically fraught heritage to ask powerful, provocative questions — about history, identity, race, and religion — that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Organized into five sections — Family, The Land, Last Measure, Abide with Me, and What Remains — and including many works not previously exhibited or published, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings is a sweeping overview of Mann’s artistic achievements.

“A Thousand Crossings and its catalog represent a large portion of Mann’s multifaceted oeuvre. It is by turns tender, light-hearted, sun-dappled, epic, allusive, burdened, scarred, mournful, dark, mindful, exploratory, expiatory, commemorative, introspective, conciliatory, and wise."

— The New York Review of Books

About the Authors:

Sally Mann is a celebrated American artist and the author of several critically acclaimed books of photography, as well as the memoir Hold Still, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She still lives in Lexington.
 Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel are curators at the National Gallery of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum, respectively, and cocurators of the Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings exhibition.

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 are rendered both disquieting and sublime. Now, having studied relationships between parent and child, artist and subject, life and death, Mann investigates the bonds between husband and wife.

Exquisitely detailed, intimate, psychologically and emotionally intense, Sally Mann: Proud Flesh engages territory most often inhabited by male artists portraying their wives and female lovers, as Mann turns the camera to her husband of 39 years, Larry.

Beautiful, textured and provocative, these unprecedented nude studies neither objectify nor celebrate; rather, they go far under the skin to suggest a relationship between man and woman that is profoundly trusting: sensual, sexual, sometimes painful, often indescribably tender and always unblinkingly honest.

About the Author:

Sally Mann is a celebrated American artist and the author of several critically acclaimed books of photography, as well as the memoir Hold Still, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She still lives in Lexington.