Emmett #3, from the series Faces

Sally Mann is an internationally acclaimed American photographer known for her intimate yet haunting landscapes and portraits. Mann uses 19th century photographic techniques that incorporate collodion solution and a varnish containing diatomaceous earth – the fossilized remains of tiny marine creatures – to develop her richly-textured, often black and white prints. Whether she is exploring motherhood, family, the passing of time, or contemporary social issues, Mann’s evocative images capture moments of curiosity, beauty and loss.

Portraiture, including of the artist’s family, has been an important part of Mann’s practice since the 1990s. Mann’s Faces series (2004) includes close-up portraits of her children Jessie, Virginia and Emmett. The soft-focus and surface imperfections give the prints a tender yet enigmatic quality that captures this fleeting moment in the subjects’ adolescent youth. The tight cropping adds to the ambiguity of the images, as the faces appear transient in front of the camera. In Jessie #25, Mann’s daughter embodies a dream-like innocence with her head tilted, eyes closed, and her face veiled by a wash of vein-like textures on the print. Emmett #3 captures Mann’s son in a different emotional state. In this more shadowy image, Emmett’s eyes appear alert as he stares intently out of the frame. Across both works, Mann draws viewers into an interior, psychological space to explore the complexities of familial bonds, motherhood, growing up, and the fragility of physical presence.

Describing her portraiture, Mann says; ‘Every image is in some way a “portrait”, not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.’