Sally Mann: At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women (30th Anniversary Edition)

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Aperture Foundation, Incorporated (1996). Everything that lives, eats. Aperture. ISBN 978-0-89381-686-5. At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a 1988 photography book by Sally Mann. The book is published by Aperture and contains 37 duotone images of 12-year-old girls. The girls are the children of friends and relatives of Mann in her home state Virginia. [1] Unlike Mann's later work, the images within the book do not feature nudity. The book is dedicated to Mann's husband, Larry. [2] Reception [ edit ] Kennedy, Randy (May 13, 2015). "Sally Mann on Her History, Frame by Frame". The New York Times . Retrieved October 9, 2018. In addition to representing Mann's Immediate Family series exclusively, Edwynn Houk Gallery has premiered the artist's Mother Land (1997), Deep South ( Landscapes / 1997), Last Measure ( Battlefields / 2000-3) and ambrotype ( Faces and Omphalos, 2012) bodies of work.

Raymond, Claire (2017). Women photographers and feminist aesthetics. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138644281. OCLC 988890552.At Twelve is Sally Mann’s revealing, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls on the verge of adulthood. To be young and female in America is a time of tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction, “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. The young women in Mann’s unflinching, large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer’s gaze with a disturbing equanimity. Poet Jonathan Williams writes, “Sally Mann’s girls are the ones who do the hard looking in At Twelve—be up to it!”

Alongside the Prix Pictet garland, Mann is a Guggenheim fellow and a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She was named America’s Best Photographer by TIME magazine in 2001. Others jumped to Mann's defense, however. Commenting on her Immediate Family (1992) collection (in which Damaged Child featured), novelist Whitney Otto argued that Mann presents "a complex, humanist world, both romanticized and real [and that] The hue and cry over Mann's pictures - though it's lessened with time - was so gratifying to me, a woman writer with a child, because it forced the public to see, to really see as if for the first time, that home life, that domesticity, that social sphere as unsettling, and thorny, and as important as any other aspect of human experience". Sally Mann's made poetic photographs explore the most fundamental themes of the human condition: family, nature, desire, death, and storytelling. Her oeuvre, which spans more than four decades, is united by its rootedness in the American South, as well as the artist's experimental, masterful, and sometimes intentionally imperfect printmaking process. Mann responded, "I didn't expect the controversy over the pictures of my children. I was just a mother photographing her children as they were growing up. I was exploring different subjects with them". Nevertheless, she treated the complaints seriously and took her children to a psychologist (who concluded that they were "well-adjusted and self-assured"), and even considered postponing the publication of the Immediate Family to "when the kids won't be living in the same bodies [and when they'll] have matured and they'll understand the implications of the pictures". But it was her children who insisted that the images should be made public. As her husband Larry noted, "The kids are aware how the pictures are received in the art world and they're proud of them". Mann did ask each child sift through the collection and remove those they were unhappy with, but the images they removed were, not the naked images, but those, in Mann's words, that made them look "like dorks".A self-portrait (which also included her two daughters) was featured on the September 9, 2001 cover of The New York Times Magazine, for a theme issue on "Women Looking at Women". First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a contemporary classic by one of photography’s most renowned photographers. To mark the book’s thirtieth anniversary, Aperture is reoriginating it in a masterful facsimile edition that retains the purity of the original.

Honorary Fellowships". Royal Photographic Society. Archived from the original on August 14, 2012 . Retrieved September 7, 2012. First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a groundbreaking classic by one of photography’s most renowned artists. Aperture is reoriginating it in a masterful facsimile edition that retains the purity of the original.

The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann

Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann. Directed by Steven Cantor and Peter Spirer. Moving Target Productions. 30 minutes, color, DVD. Nomination for an Academy Award for Best Documentary: Short Subject (1992) This is especially true in images such as the former as well as Untitled (Theresa and the Tattooed Man), where tension created by the physical closeness of the younger girl and rough-and-tough man, as required by the pose, is especially palpable. Around a quarter of the 60 images Mann published showed her children unclothed, their bodies often holding evidence from their play on the farm. Sometimes, Mann would pose her children, or collaborate with them for staged scenes. Sometimes, these staged images included nudity too. Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest in photography; his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today. [6] Mann began to photograph when she was sixteen. Most of her photographs and writings are tied to Lexington, Virginia. [7] Mann graduated from The Putney School in 1969, and attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She earned a BA, summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and a MA in creative writing in 1975. [8]

Mann's family portraiture was born of a simple desire to chronicle the formative years of her own children. Brought up in a rural household, by bohemian parents whose relaxed attitude towards nudity saw Mann and her siblings playing in the family's farmyard completely unclothed, she thought nothing of photographing her own children naked or in stages of undress. Her collection Immediate Family (1992) would become a benchmark in family portraiture, but, as with At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, it saw Mann accused by her distractors of sexualizing minors. Born Sally Munger, Mann's physician father first introduced her to photography. She started studying photography at Vermont's Putney School as a teen in 1969, studying an additional two years at Bennington College under photographer Norman Sieff. There she met and proposed to Larry Mann, whom she is still married to today. She received a Bachelor's degree and later a Masters from Hollins College in Virginia before working as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University throughout the mid-1970s.Lyle Rexer, " Art/Architecture: Marriage Under Glass: Intimate Exposures", The New York Times, November 19, 2000. Sally Mann has remained close to her roots, photographing in the American South since the 1970s. She is renowned for her resonant landscape work, trenchant studies of mortality, and intimate portraits of her children and husband. A Guggenheim fellow and three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named America’s Best Photographer by Time magazine in 2001. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994) and What Remains (2007), and in 2011, she presented at Harvard the William E. Massey Sr. Lecture in American Studies, which planted the seeds for Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (2015). Mann’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Mann’s other Aperture books are Immediate Family (1992, reissued 2014), Still Time (1994), Proud Flesh (copublished with Gagosian Gallery, 2009), and The Flesh and The Spirit (copublished with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2010).