Artist Spotlight
Sally Mann is known for her photographs of intimate and familiar subjects rendered both sublime and disquieting. Her projects explore the complexities of familial relationships, social realities, and the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature, history, and memory. Central to Mann’s investigation are the landscapes that she has photographed both near her home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and across the South for over three decades. Often using a view camera, Mann draws on the history of both her medium and the Southern landscape to produce photographs that are expressive and elegiac.
Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.
Artist Spotlight: Sally Mann features a new photograph by the artist, from a never-before-seen series, Vinculum. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: © Annie Leibovitz
Sally Mann: Vinculum
Join Sally Mann at her studio in Lexington, Virginia. Filmed at work in her darkroom and within the surrounding landscape, she discusses her exploratory approach to making and printing pictures, what draws her to the landscape of the American South, and her newest body of work, Vinculum.
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Drew Gilpin Faust discusses Sally Mann’s landscape photographs of Antietam, a site that more than a century ago bore witness to one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War.
to light, and then return—: A Night of Poetry with Edmund de Waal, Elisa Gonzalez, Terrance Hayes, and Sally Mann
Gagosian presented an evening of poetry inside to light, and then return—, an exhibition of new works by Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann, inspired by each other’s practices, at Gagosian, New York. In this video—taking the artists’ shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis as a point of departure—poets Elisa Gonzalez and Terrance Hayes read a selection of their recent works that resonate with the themes of elegy and historical reckoning in the show. The evening was moderated by Jonathan Galassi, chairman and executive editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
to light, and then return—Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann
This fall, artists and friends Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann will exhibit new works together in New York. Inspired by their shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis, the works included will form a dialogue between their respective practices. Here they meet to speak about the origins and developments of the project.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2023
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
Sally Mann and Benjamin Moser
During the 2022 edition of Paris Photo, Sally Mann and Benjamin Moser sat down for an intimate conversation as the first event in Gagosian’s Paris Salon series, initiated by Jessie Fortune Ryan. In light of Moser’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag, Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), recently translated into French, the two discussed the power and responsibility tied up in their respective practices of photography and writing.
Related Exhibitions
Related News
Honor
Sally Mann
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Sally Mann was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. The artist’s induction ceremony took place in September 2023. Founded in 1780, the academy is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines, professions, and perspectives to explore challenges facing society, identify solutions, and promote nonpartisan recommendations that advance the public good.
Sally Mann during her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023. Photo: courtesy American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Award
Sally Mann
Lucie Award 2022
Sally Mann will receive a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art at the gala ceremony at Carnegie Hall in New York on October 25, 2022. The Lucie Awards were launched in 2003 as part of the Lucie Foundation’s mission to honor master photographers, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide.
Sally Mann, Lexington, Virginia, 2015. Photo: © Annie Leibovitz
Award
Sally Mann
Prix Pictet
Sally Mann is the winner of the ninth cycle of the Prix Pictet, which aims to harness the power of photography to draw global attention to issues of sustainability, particularly concerning the environment. The thematic focus of this award cycle is “fire.” Mann has been recognized for her Blackwater series (2008–12), a multifaceted exploration of the Great Dismal Swamp, which spans the border of Virginia and North Carolina. Viewed by the artist as “a vessel for the memories of the complex struggles enacted upon it,” the swamp was long a treacherous refuge for people escaping slavery, and had been devastated by wildfires by the time Mann photographed it. The award ceremony took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on December 15, 2021, in advance of the opening of an exhibition at the museum showcasing the twelve photographic series shortlisted for the prize.
Sally Mann, Blackwater 3, 2008–12 © Sally Mann
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Sally Mann in
Love Languages
Open from September 2, 2023
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.org
Love Languages considers how the making of art is a type of love language all of its own. The installation attempts to address the question “How do we prioritize tenderness against debilitating social conditions?” The works on view engage with the necessity of intimacy in interpersonal and collective relationships. Work by Sally Mann is included.
Sally Mann, Jessie #25, 2004 © Sally Mann
On View
Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
Through April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.
Rick Lowe, Fire #4: This Time Athens, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Rick Lowe Studio
On View
New Symphony of Time
Opened September 7, 2019
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson
www.msmuseumart.org
New Symphony of Time expands the boundaries of Mississippi’s identity, casting light on a shared past to help reflect an expansive, more inclusive future. The exhibition aims to explore personal and collective memory, history and the connection to place, and the roles artists play in pursuit of civil rights and racial equity through ancestry. Themes include migration, movement, and home; shared humanity; environment; and liberty. Work by Titus Kaphar and Sally Mann is included.
Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Emmett Till River Bank), 1998 © Sally Mann
Closed
Sally Mann in
Real Families: Stories of Change
October 6, 2023–January 7, 2024
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England
fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
Real Families: Stories of Change brings together more than 120 artworks spanning painting, photography, sculpture, and film. The exhibition asks viewers to question what makes a family today and to consider the impact our families have on us, through the eyes of contemporary artists. Work by Sally Mann is included.
Sally Mann, Three Generations, 1991 © Sally Mann