Sally Turner Munger (Sally Mann) was born in Lexington, Virginia on May 1st, 1951 to Robert S. Munger and Elizabeth Evans Munger. She was the youngest of three children and their only daughter, she was inspired in the arts area at a young age as her father supported her taking photos.
He encouraged him to take photos with his 5×7 camera. In 1969 she graduated from the Putney School where she began using the dark room. She then later attended both Bennington College and Friends World College. In 1974 she earned a B. A, with the highest honor, from Hollins College and an M. F.
A. in creative writing in 1975. She also have eight books. In 1984 Sally first book, Second Sight, was published.
Mann’s first book call “Second Sight” contains her early landscapes and portraits of women. Her second try, “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women,” she takes her female portraiture further than Second Sight by creating images that “captured the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls and expressive printing style lent a dramatic and gloomy mood to all her photos that she took. She thought this would make her images pop even better then then her first book. The consequences of real life: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. Sally does not deny reality, but records it, faces of her subjects in this book to make it a powerful strong book. Her third book showed her as a talented, controversial, and stylistically unique photographic artist.
“Immediate Family” is Sally most well-known collection of work, was published in 1992, and gain much positive and negative criticism. The New York Times said of “Immediate Family”: “probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world. ” This book was big disapproval, 65 photographs contained her three children at their summer cabin with a river where they are seen playing and swimming nude. The nude photographs made viewers in rage, especially Christian people. She defended her photographs as” natural through the eyes of a mother, since she have seen her children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry, and even being nude”.
After “Immediate Family” came out in 1994, “Still Time” came out. A collection of more photos of her children, more abstract photos, and colored landscapes. “Still Time” marked the transition of her earlier work into her current wet glass collodion process. Sally’s fifth, sixth, and seventh books (What Remains, Deep South, and Proud Flesh) collections of photographs taken on wet plate collodion 8×10 glass negatives. What Remains, is a photo-essay split into five part, explores the idea of death and the stages of deterioration. Deep South is more of gloomy southern landscapes like for example Georgia.
Proud Flesh is a six-year study of her husband’s muscular dystrophy. In 2010 Sally released a reflection collection entitled The Flesh and the Spirit. It contains both recent and unpublished artwork and was printed in conjunction with a reflection gallery show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. She use a 100-year-old 8×10 bellows view camera to take photos.
She works mainly on black and white but also does some color work. Her work is characterized as hazy or ghostly, and includes scratches and print imperfections caused by her collodion process. Overall she has been subject of frequent feminist studies for her portraiture of the feminine form and on female struggles in her work, mainly in “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. ” She is praised in the feminist community for making new ground for female fine artists in the field of photography. Sally has proved herself not as just a photographer, but as a talented and strong artist.
She creates originally work, using originally processes, and backs it all up with well-informed reasoning.
Bibliography:
ART21. PBS. 2001. 2012. Mann, Sally.
Sally Mann. 2010.
