For more than forty years, Sally Mann has been producing experimental photographs of bewitching and melancholy beauty, exploring the primordial themes of existence: memory, desire, death, family ties and the masterful indifference of nature with regard to human activity. What unites this vast corpus of works (portraits, still lifes, landscapes and other studies) is that it was born from a place, the southern United States. Originally from Lexington, Virginia, Mann uses her deep love for her homeland and knowledge of her historically-charged heritage to ask powerful and provocative questions – about history, identity, race, and religion – that resonate with geographical and national boundaries. She gained international fame in the late ’80s, in a controversial climate related to her portrayal of a sensual and serious childhood, whose protagonists were her own children and the backdrop, an ancestral virginian landscape. Published by the American editions Abrams Books, the catalog of the traveling exhibition (Washington, Salem, Los Angeles, Houston, Paris, Atlanta), presents an overview of the artistic achievements of the American photographer. Organized in five major sections – Family, The Land, Last Measure, Abide with Me, and What Remains – and including many works that have never been exhibited or published before, A Thousand Crossings is a masterful retrospective of Sally Mann. With this imposing 320-page book, the artist once again affirms her status as a figurehead in a vein of contemporary photography that is anachronistic in her pictorialism, uninhibited about modernity and claiming her archaism. as the mark of its aesthetics and its timeless concerns.
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