First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a contemporary classic by one of photography’s most renowned photographers. To mark the book’s thirtieth anniversary, Aperture is reoriginating it in a masterful facsimile edition that retains the purity of the original.

At Twelve is Sally Mann’s revealing, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls on the verge of adulthood. To be young and female in America is a time of tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. 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.” The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. The young women in Mann’s unflinching, large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer’s gaze with a disturbing equanimity. Poet Jonathan Williams writes, “Sally Mann’s girls are the ones who do the hard looking in At Twelve ― be up to it!”

This reissue of At Twelve has been printed using new scans and separations from Mann’s prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a freshness and sumptuousness true to the original edition.

About the Authors:

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 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. Her many books include At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), The Flesh and the Spirit (2010), Remembered Light (2016), and Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (2018). In 2001 Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine. A 1994 documentary about her work, Blood Ties, was nominated for an Academy Award and the feature film, What Remains, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. Her best-selling memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Mann is represented by Gagosian, New York. She lives in Virginia.

Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Prize collections. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and she was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently lives in Maine, Virginia, and Florida. 

In this extraordinary memoir, the acclaimed American photographer Sally Mann blends narrative and image to explore the forces that shaped her work. Delving back into her family’s past and the storied landscapes of the South, Hold Still is about how we are made by people and place, and how we make our experiences into art. This is a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of Mann’s remarkable life.

About the Author:

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 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.

Her many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh and the Spirit (2010). A feature film about her work, What Remains, debuted to critical acclaim in 2006. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.

The much-anticipated new book by artist and New York Times bestselling author Sally Mann about the challenges and transcendent pleasures of the creative process

Art Work, by photographer and writer Sally Mann, offers a spellbinding mix of wild and illuminating stories, practical (and some impractical) advice, and life lessons for artists and writers―or anyone interested in the creative path. Written in the same frank, fearless, and occasionally outrageous tone of her bestselling memoir, Hold Still, this new book reaffirms Mann as a unique and resonant voice for our times and is destined to become a classic.

Illustrated throughout with photographs, journal entries, and letters that bring immediacy and poignancy to the narrative, Art Work is full of thought-provoking insights about the hazards of early promise; the unpredictable role of luck; the value of work, work, work, and more hard work; the challenges of rejection and distraction; the importance of risk-taking; and the rewards of knowing why and when you say yes. In sparkling prose and thoughtfully juxtaposed visuals and ephemera, Art Work is a generous, provocative, and compulsively readable exploration of creativity by one of our most original thinkers.

About the Author:

Sally Mann is a Guggenheim Fellow and three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time in 2001. In 2021, she received the Prix Pictet and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary. Mann’s Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Little, Brown, 2015) received universal critical acclaim, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

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.