Sally Mann

Sally Mann was born at Lexington in Virginia in 1951, studied at Bennington and Hollins, and has worked from Lexington throughout her career. At Twelve, portraits of girls on the threshold of adolescence, appeared in 1988. Immediate Family, published in 1992, photographed her three young children on the family's farm — often unclothed, sometimes bruised or bloodied from play — in large-format black and white of unusual beauty, and was met with admiration and outrage in roughly equal measure. From the mid-1990s she turned to the landscapes of the South, to Civil War battlefields, to her husband Larry, and in What Remains to death and decay, increasingly using the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process. Her memoir Hold Still was published in 2015.

Process decides almost everything. The family pictures and early work are gelatin silver prints, printed by Mann herself, often toned, and made in editions at more than one size. The later collodion work includes unique objects — ambrotypes on glass and tintypes on metal — as well as editioned prints enlarged from collodion negatives, and a unique plate and a print of the same image are entirely different things. Edition number, size, process and date of printing identify a work. Collodion surfaces and their varnish are fragile, and the streaks, pours and flaws are part of the image rather than damage, which makes condition a matter for someone who knows the process. Her galleries hold the edition records.