In the early 2000s, Mann embarked on several series of photographs that consider how slavery and segregation had left their mark on the landscape of Virginia and, in turn, shaped her own childhood and identity. She created two groups of pictures depicting physical and spiritual pathways: the rivers and swamps that had offered escape routes for fugitive slaves in the antebellum South; and the churches that promised safe harbor, communion, and deliverance for generations of African Americans following the Civil War. She also began to make intimate portraits of black men and reconsidered pictures she had made earlier of Virginia Carter, the caretaker who had worked for her family for fifty years. Bringing all these photographs together, Mann titled them Abide with Me, a plea for tolerance that refers to a nineteenth-century Christian hymn imploring God to remain present throughout life’s trials.

In 2008, as Mann explored stories of oppression and struggles for freedom embedded in the Virginia landscape, she began to photograph in the Great Dismal Swamp and along the nearby Blackwater and Nottoway Rivers. For centuries the treacherous swamp had offered sanctuary to fugitive slaves, while the rivers had provided means of escape. Mann’s interest in these sites was inspired by the story of Nat Turner, the leader of a violent slave rebellion in 1831. Turner hid for more than two months near the Great Dismal Swamp before he was discovered, tried, and executed. His insurrection and its backlash were among the bloodiest racial conflicts in American history.

Mann’s pictures present threatening and visually chaotic realms that only the most desperate and brave would dare enter. She created these works as tintypes, photographs on sheets of black-lacquered metal. Although many were made in the Great Dismal Swamp, Mann titled all of them Blackwater. With its ominous metaphoric overtones, the term denotes a type of slow-moving channel that flows through wetlands, turning dark as vegetation decays.