Sunday, January 6, 2019

Sally Mann - A Thousand Crossings at The Getty


Sally Mann - A Thousand Crossings at The Getty Center. 
For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born in 1951) has made experimental and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: family, desire, mortality, memory, and nature’s indifference to the human condition. Her broad body of work is all bred of a place, the American South. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Mann has long examined the tension between her devotion to the region and her awareness of its fraught past. Her photographs pose provocative questions about identity, history, race, and spirituality. This exhibition considers how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—has shaped the artist’s career and continues to inform the American experience. 
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts and runs until February 10. 

There is an excellent an extensive overview of Sally Mann's practice on the The Getty site. This covers her early work photographing her her three children - Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia - at the family’s remote summer cabin in the Shenandoah Valley, in western Virginia. She primarily used a large 8 × 10 inch camera to convey the detail and texture of everyday life.  The text concludes with commentary on the pictures Mann has made of her husband, Larry, since they met in 1969. In the early 2000s Mann began to document the transformations to his body caused by muscular dystrophy. She called this series Proud Flesh, a term for the scar tissue that forms over a horse’s wounds.
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 2006 feature film What Remains was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. Her bestselling memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2016 Hold Still won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The National Gallery of Art presented a critically lauded show, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, in 2018. Comprised of 109 prints and several videos, A Thousand Crossings addresses complex issues relating to the American South and will travel internationally until the beginning of 2020. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.

You can go to The Getty site HERE and Sally Mann's website HERE.

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