Sally Mann

As her children grew into adolescence, Mann gradually turned from photographing her family to recording the surrounding landscape. She commented at the time: “Something strange is happening with the family pictures. The kids seem to be . . . receding into the landscape. . . . I have been ambushed by my backgrounds.” She began with the rolling hills, rivers, and forests near her home in Lexington, Virginia, and later ventured farther south—to Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The photographs she made in the Deep South often allude to larger national histories of war, suffering, and injustice as Mann sought to show how the land held the scars of the past.

Mann experimented with her technique as she traveled, fitting her camera with a faulty antique lens that created flares of light and other unpredictable results. For some photographs, she used high-contrast film that exaggerated both light and dark to capture what she called the “radical light of the American South.” For other pictures, she adopted a nineteenth-century method of making negatives on glass, welcoming flaws in the process for expressive effect.