| Existing comment:
For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born 1951) has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work is that it is all bred of a place, the American South. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Mann has long written about what it means to live in the South and be identified as a southerner. Using her deep love of her native land and her knowledge of its fraught history, she asks provocative questions -- about history, identity, race, and religion -- that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings considers how Mann's relationship with this land has shaped her work and how the legacy of the South -- as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground -- continues to permeate American identity. |