Sally Mann photographs ‘At Twelve’

Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta presents the premiere of previously unreleased photographs from Sally Mann’s groundbreaking series At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, a collective portrait of 12-year-olds on the verge of adulthood. The artist is renowned for her evocative work exploring themes of family, identity, and the American South. The portraits in this exhibition were taken by Mann between 1983-1985 with her large format camera in Rockbridge County, Virginia, the artist’s birthplace and where she continues to live and draw inspiration. 

She revisited her At Twelve archive last year, discovering unseen treasures, remarking: “One of the advantages of a long life is that you get to go back and revisit parts of your work that were overlooked, sometimes inexplicably, in early years.”

Jackson Fine Art is honored to be able to present the exhibition in close collaboration with the artist and Gagosian. The gallery has exhibited Mann’s work since 1996, and this is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition here. The exhibition coincides with the reissue of the book At Twelve, published by Aperture in 1988; signed copies will be available at the gallery.

Twelve is an age of expanding horizons, enriched by social experiences and shared connections. It is also a transitional period, navigating the delicate space between childhood and adulthood. The At Twelve portraits reveal this delicate balance, portraying both the innocence of youth and the yearning for maturity. The young women in these images are relatives or daughters of friends, but also, many are others living in her small Virginia community who trusted the artist to capture their individual spirit with grace and honesty. Taken nearly forty years ago, these images continue to hold relevance today, bridging the past and present in their exploration of this transformative stage in a young woman’s life.

About Sally Mann

Born in Lexington, Virginia, Sally Mann began to study photography in the late 1960s, attending the Ansel Adams Gallery’s Yosemite Workshops in Yosemite National Park, California and the Putney School and Bennington College, both in Vermont. She received a BA from Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia, in 1974, and an MA in creative writing the following year. At a moment when many other photographers were creating large-scale color prints, Mann looked to photography’s past, investigating the visual and metaphorical potential of employing nineteenth-century technologies. She has long used an 8 x 10 bellows camera and has explored platinum, bromoil, and wet-plate collodion processes for making prints.

Mann had her first solo museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1977, presenting The Lewis Law Portfolio (1974–76), a series of black-and-white photographs that comprise some of her earliest explorations into the inherent abstract beauty of the everyday. In the early 1980s she published two books, Second Sight and At Twelve, the latter a study of young girls on the cusp of womanhood. Between 1984 and 1994 she worked on the series Family Pictures, which focused on her three children, then all under the age of twelve. These works touch on ordinary moments—playing, sleeping, and eating—as well as exploring larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of childhood and motherhood.

From the late 1990s into the 2000s, Mann honed in on her relationship with the American South, taking photographs in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana for her Deep South series (2005), as well as Civil War battlefields for Last Measure (2000). Her longtime interest in themes of death, time, and decay are evident in What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), a five-part study of mortality ranging from pictures of the decomposing body of her beloved greyhound to photographs of the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property.

In 2003, Mann began documenting the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband, Larry. These candid and frank portraits, which would later become the Proud Flesh series (2009), recall classical sculpture while capturing a male subject in moments of intimate vulnerability. During those years, Mann repeatedly visited Cy Twombly’s warmly lit studio in Lexington, recording the moments she spent with him there as well as the traces of his artistic life, resulting in the series Remembered Light published by Abrams in 2016.

Mann’s large-scale exhibition, A Thousand Crossings, further explored the complex cultural identity of the American South, Mann’s place of origin—a region rich in literary and artistic traditions but troubled by its often painful history. The exhibition, which she began working on in 2006, debuted at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in 2018 and traveled extensively in the United States and abroad.

A Guggenheim fellow and a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine in 2001. In 2021, she received the Prix Pictet and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008. Mann’s Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Little, Brown, 2015) received universal critical acclaim; it was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Awards and in 2016 won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

About Jackson Fine Art

Jackson Fine Art is a world-renowned gallery with a 34-year history of supporting artists and collectors. The gallery cultivates and guides both emerging and established collectors to the best fine art photography of the 20th and 21st century, across both traditional and innovative photo-based mediums. Working closely with collectors, curators, consultants, and designers, JFA provides expertise in a warm, welcoming space in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta.

The gallery is led by Co-Owner & Creative Director, Anna Walker Skillman, and Co-Owner Andy Heyman, Founder, ASH IP& ASH Atlanta. In the spring of 2023, Jackson Fine Art relocated to a custom-built, 4,000 square-foot gallery with expanded exhibition, office, inventory, library and meeting spaces to keep pace with the growing clientele and opportunity to exhibit large-scale works.

In addition to 9-12 exhibitions annually, Jackson Fine Art participates in international art fairs, including Paris Photo; The Photography Show (AIPAD) in New York; Art Miami; and Intersect Aspen. The gallery is a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) and Ms. Skillman is a former member of the board of directors. Jackson Fine Art has placed work in numerous important private and public collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; High Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris to name a few.

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