Sally Mann - Immediate Family

Sally Mann: Immediate Family

Black/white photos by artist Sally Mann, of her children Emmett, Jessie and Virginia
(Her third and most famous collection)


About the book

This is a book of remarkable images - intense and intimate - recording the photographer's children as they explore their woodland home in Virginia. The striking photographs show the ambiguities and dramas of family life, hauntingly evoking the mysteries of childhood. All of the photographs in Immediate Family were taken with an 8" x 10" view camera.

As Sally Mann herself says in the introduction: 'These are photographs of my children … many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river.'

The result is a book that is ethereal, tender and sometimes eerily disquieting: a distinctly human work - at once personal and universal - that is magnetically seductive.


About the author(s)

Sally Mann has exhibited and taught all over the United States. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chrysler Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other major American collections.

She has received grants from the NEA, the NEH, the Friends of Photography, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Her most recent book is At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (Aperture, 1988). She lives in Lexington, Virginia, with her husband and three children, whom she continues to photograph as part of an ongoing project.

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina, in 1933. His 1962 novel A Long and Happy Life received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel, and has never been out of print. He has published numerous other novels, including Kate Vaiden, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, a memoir, and he has written for the screen and television. He is a member of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters as well as being James B Duke Professor of English at Duke University. His most recent book is Blue Calhoon.