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Gagosian Gallery will host the West Coast premiere of Sally Mann's new photographs, consisting of large format landscapes taken in rural Georgia and Virginia. The prints of the Georgia series are 38 x 48 inches, the Virginia series are 30 x 40 inches, and all are mounted in frames designed by the photographer.
In this new body of work, titled MOTHER LAND: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia, Sally Mann combines landscape, history, and the feminine to define the firmament of human life and psyche. In her celebrated Immediate Family pictures, her children and husband were the primary subjects, resulting in photographs that expressed a profound tension between innocence and high sensuousness. They also called attention to her entwined roles as mother, wife, and creator of those intimate and seductive images.
During the making of the Immediate Family series, Sally Mann felt increasingly drawn to the element of landscape, often finding these settings first, before deciding how she might incorporate her human subjects into the composition. Following this impulse, she began expeditions into the Southern countryside, not far from her home in Virginia, taking with her a large format camera and a selection of antique lenses, one of which was owned by Nadar, perhaps the greatest photographer of nineteenth century France.
"MOTHER LAND" is the result of these expeditions, and Mann portrays with great drama and insight the landscape's infinitely complex character. While the large format prints signify an intensely contemporary vision, the antique lenses sometimes impart halos of light, cracks, and distortions which embrace a sense of the past, of time and memory, and of the stark grandness of nineteenth century landscape photography. An allée of moss-hung live oaks, an urn set in an open glade, or the landscape itself, seen as a gorgeous relic, complete these remarkable images.
Like all of Sally Mann's prior work, the landscapes of "MOTHER LAND" are portraits. But their subject is now the terrain of human and of natural history, signified in the land. Its vast body and changing demeanor are portrayed with the deep sensuality, humanness, and emotion for which Sally Mann is eminently celebrated.
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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.
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.
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
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
