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Sally Mann

January 8–February 9, 2008
Beverly Hills

Sally Mann, Jessie #30, 2004 Gelatin silver print with varnish, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm), edition of 5

Sally Mann, Jessie #30, 2004

Gelatin silver print with varnish, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm), edition of 5

Sally Mann, Emmett #15, 2004 Gelatin silver print with varnish, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm), edition of 5

Sally Mann, Emmett #15, 2004

Gelatin silver print with varnish, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm), edition of 5

Sally Mann, Virginia #38, 2004 Gelatin silver print with varnish, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm), edition of 5

Sally Mann, Virginia #38, 2004

Gelatin silver print with varnish, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm), edition of 5

About

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-format photographs by Sally Mann. Executed between 2000 and 2004, these works consist of images of the faces of her three children Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia.

These powerful images of Mann's children are simultaneously painterly and photographic. They are made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate. The resulting light sensitive plate, loaded into a plate holder and attached to the camera, must be exposed while still wet, a period of approximately six minutes. The photographers who originally used this method, which was introduced in 1851, worked to perfect the process and avoid irregularities. Sally Mann, however, embraces these aberrations; she celebrates the peculiar flares, stains and dust trails unique to the collodion process. She describes them as serendipitous, as "perfect flaws" which help create the mystical and poetic quality of the photographs. Perhaps because of the lengthy exposures (as long as 6 minutes and never less than 3), the images possess a transcendent timelessness. It may be this sense of suspended time, as much as genetics, that renders the faces of Mann's children eerily interchangeable. Enigmatic, they seem to be awaiting the viewer's glance to wake from their shadowed stillness and take their next breath.

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. She has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of major museums and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Corcoran Museum of Art.

There will be a fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

Elisa Gonzalez and Terrance Hayes

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.

Five white objects lined up on a white shelf

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.

Roe Ethridge's Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2023

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

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.

Still from "Sally Mann: Vinculum".

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 and Edmund de Waal at the Frick Collection, New York, November 8, 2019.

In Conversation
Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann

Sally Mann joins Edmund de Waal onstage at the Frick Collection in New York to converse about art, writing, and the importance of place in their respective bodies of work. 

News

Photo: © Annie Leibovitz

Artist Spotlight

Sally Mann

November 17–23, 2021

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.

Photo: © Annie Leibovitz