Sally Mann

Sally Mann

Born in Lexington, Virginia on May 1, 1951; Sally Mann was destined to become an artist. Ever since High School she knew she wanted to be an artist and at that time it was thought to be unorthodox. Luckily for her, her father loved art, especially sculpting and supported Sally in her dreams. Her interest in photography came when her dad gave her his 5x7 camera and took it up at her University, Putney. Ever since then Sally Mann has always had a camera in her hand taking pictures of anything that catches her eye. Sally Mann had a few books and galleries of her photography; however, it wasn’t until her third collection, Immediate Family in 1992 that catapulted her into international fame. Unfortunately, not all her fame was positive. There came a lot of criticism from the public and media on her collection which showed her three young children in various positions and places that showed all sides of growing up, even the dark and unmentioned sides of childhood, to which Sally answered back that it was a view of a mother watching her children grow up and go through all the changes in which children go through. After 10 years of photographing her children, Sally become bored and started to photograph landscape and fell in love with it. For Sally Mann, there was magic on photographing landscape because you would always ask, “How did I get that?” Sally Mann uses a technique called “wet plate” process, or collodion, where glass plates are coated with collodion, dipped in silver nitrate and exposed while still wet. This gives the photos an unworldly effect, one that can never be produced the same. Sally Mann’s more recent work was on new subject, death. She took pictures of her dead dog in its many forms of decomposition as well as human corpses at federal Forensic Anthropology facility, her property where an escaped convict killed himself and some of the bloodiest battlegrounds in the Civil War. A quote that Sally Mann said has had great effect and insight on me as a person and photographer; “Things that are close to you are the things you photograph the best”.