Sally Mann

Motherland

A lifelong resident of Lexington, Virginia, Sally Mann has placed the Southern landscape and the region’s fraught history at the center of a provocative inquiry into the essence of American identity. When Mann received a commission from the High in 1996, she had recently concluded Immediate Family, a series about the abounding vagaries and grace of childhood, and had begun photographing the bucolic countryside surrounding her family farm. In a fax she wrote to the High’s photography curator, Ellen Fluerov, before accepting the commission, Mann described the atmospheric qualities of her nascent forays with landscape as “almost pure vapor: the whiff of dark loss and neglect.”

After some hesitation about the limitations presented by Atlanta’s urban environs, Mann settled on photographing in and around Savannah, the oldest city in Georgia. For four days at the end of March 1996, she experimented with orthochromatic film—a rarely used film that is sensitive to blue wavelengths of light and distinct for rendering scenes in high contrast—and nineteenth-century barrel lenses; together, these added a sense of melancholy and grandeur to the overgrown plantation houses, rambling farms, and Civil War battle sites she photographed. After years of employing a refined and precise technique, she found the unpredictability of these materials and the radiant quality of light they yielded creatively liberating.

Mann continued to work in this manner for another year before she adopted the wet collodion process. Of the resulting body of work, which she titled Motherland, she wrote, “These photographs are about memory and time and the still point at which they intersect . . . for me, making these images was a dizzying, time-unraveling spiral into the radical light of the South . . . . I noted the ways we compose history’s beautiful lie.”

View all works in the commission.