SAN SEBASTIÁN.- Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of the most important figures in contemporary American photography. Active since the late sixties, she has built up a consistent and demanding body of work that primarily focuses on her native region of the American South, which she continues to explore. She has received many awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work is now held in the collections of major international institutions.
From the outset, Sally Mann has been part of a photographic tradition that pays attention to the materiality of the medium and its place in history. Self-taught, she developed an early practice based on the use of large-format cameras, which demand patience, precision and technical rigour. This choice proved decisive, as it structures her relationship with time, her subjects and the landscape, imbuing her images with a particular density that is uniquely Mann’s.
The Macula et Materia exhibition at Kutxa Fundazioa Artegunea offers a journey through the major series that define her oeuvre. Among others, it brings together At Twelve (1983–1985), Immediate Family (1984–1994), landscapes of Virginia (1992–1996), Georgia (1996) and the Deep South (1998), as well as later works such as Faces (2004), Proud Flesh (2006–2015), Delta (2016), Platinum Stones (2022) and Goshen (2025). These series demonstrate the continuity of the artist’s concerns despite the apparent diversity of the themes addressed: childhood, family, landscape, historical memory, illness, decay and corporeality.
The creation of the At Twelve series represents one of the most significant moments in her career. Produced in her native region, it features portraits of twelve-year-old girls photographed in their everyday environments. The images explore the transition from childhood to adolescence, a time of instability and identity transformation, without any idealisation at all. Mann established here a working method based on collaboration with her models and the use of minimal staging, in which domestic or rural spaces play a defining role.
However, it is with Immediate Family that Sally Mann achieved international recognition and also media visibility marked by controversy. Produced over a period of ten years, the series documents the daily lives of her three children on the family property in Virginia. When the book was published in 1992, it sparked an intense debate in the United States because some critics considered it to be a transgression of social norms regarding the representation of childhood.
From the early 1990s onwards, Sally Mann shifted her focus to landscape photography without abandoning her concerns regarding history and time. The series dedicated to Virginia, Georgia and the Deep South mark a decisive turning point. In them, she photographed places associated with the American Civil War (1861–1865), slavery and racial segregation. Far from producing a strictly historical document, she offers a visual meditation on the persistence of the past in the landscape.
Human presence is often absent from these images, yet history inhabits them. Battlefields, swamps, rivers and forests are photographed as surfaces charged with memory. Mann occasionally uses antique processes, particularly wet collodion, a 19th-century technique that involves manually applying a chemical solution to a glass plate. The process, creating imperfections, fogging and alterations, enhances the material dimension of the image, establishing a direct link with the history of photography. Chemical accidents thus become an integral part of the work’s meaning, suggesting erosion, degradation and the fragility of traces.
The question of American history, particularly that of the South, is central to these works. The landscapes photographed are associated with episodes linked to violence. Rather than depicting these events directly, Sally Mann suggests their persistence through topography and light. Her approach therefore differs from traditional photojournalism or documentary photography, prioritising a form of visual meditation on the layers of the past.
This reflection on time continues in later works such as Faces and Proud Flesh. The first brings together a series of portraits in which the face is envisaged as a territory for recording time. Proud Flesh, images of her husband Larry Mann, who suffers from a Muscular Dystrophy, an untreatable muscle-wasting disease, explores the body’s progressive degeneration, physical fragility and the enduring nature of the marital bond. The body appears as a place where time is inscribed biologically, reminiscent of landscapes marked by history.
Through these different series, Sally Mann has created a body of work structured around several consistent themes: geographical roots in the American South, focus on the physical nature of the photographic medium, exploration of the relationship between personal memory and collective history and, finally, contemplation of the passage of time. Her use of antique photographic processes is far from merely an aesthetic choice, but part of an inquiry into photography as a trace.
The exhibition Macula et Materia highlights this coherence. By bringing together portraits, landscapes and studies of the body, it demonstrates that themes in Sally Mann’s work are not compartmentalised, but rather participate in a single enquiry into memory, transmission and disappearance. The American South is not merely a backdrop; it constitutes the historical and cultural context for which the artist constructs her work. The history of slavery, the Civil War and racial violence are present as a structural reality whose effects extend into the present day.
Consequently, Sally Mann’s work is framed within both an American photographic tradition—paying attention to landscape and national identity—and a personal inquiry into family, the body and loss. By articulating these dimensions, she creates work that questions the very conditions of visual memory: how can an image capture that which is no longer visible? How can time be inscribed onto a fixed surface?
More than a simple retrospective, Macula et Materia helps us understand the continuity of a trajectory spanning more than five decades. Rather than taking a strictly poetic or symbolic approach, Sally Mann’s work unfolds as a historical and material investigation of territory, the body and self-image.
IMMEDIATE FAMILY: CHILDHOOD AND TEMPORALITY
Between 1984 and 1994, Sally Mann created this series dedicated to her three children: Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. Taken in a rural setting, the photographs show the children playing, injured, pensive or absorbed in their activities. The series sparked significant controversy upon its publication, in some cases because of the childrens’ nudity, and in others because of the viewer’s feelings that the approach presented a problematic staging of childhood.
Nonetheless, beyond the controversy, the series belongs to a tradition of family portraiture, questioning the boundary between private life and public space. It also reflects on vulnerability, the construction of identity and family memory because the images do not necessarily resemble spontaneous family photographs, as they are carefully composed. The children often participated in the construction of the image, in some cases inspired by classical pictorial references.
Childhood is presented here as an intermediate stage, situated between freedom and the nascent awareness of finitude. The bodies are simultaneously powerful and fragile.
A fundamental aspect of this series is the suppression of contemporary temporal markers. Clothing, modern objects and period details are either absent or reduced to a minimum so that the images acquire a timeless quality, making the children seem as though they belong to an indeterminate, almost mythical time.
Photography here becomes a tool for suspending time. It captures a precise instant while simultaneously inscribing it within an extended duration. In Mann’s work, childhood is not merely a biological period; it is a symbolic territory.
FACES: PORTRAITURE AND FINITUDE
In 2004, Sally Mann began her Faces series, featuring intimate portraits of her adult children. The faces are framed closely, often bathed in soft light. Long exposure times produce a slight stillness and occasionally an opacity in the gaze.
Departing from the narrative energy of Immediate Family, these portraits introduce a more explicit reflection on the passage of time. The frontal presentation of the faces alludes to certain ancient traditions of funerary portraiture. The model’s fixed stare establishes a direct relationship with the viewer. The focus is no longer on capturing a moment of childhood, but on questioning the permanence of identity in the face of transformation.
Photography acts as a trace and paradoxical device in Faces: it captures while simultaneously pointing to future disappearance. The faces are recorded with almost sculptural precision, yet they are also subject to progressive alteration through changes in light and exposure time.
This theme would continue in the self-portraits Sally Mann produced later. The photographer’s aging body, in turn, becoming an object of exploration.
PROUD FLESH: THE BODY AND ILLNESS
In the series Proud Flesh (2006–2015), Sally Mann photographed her husband, Larry Mann, who suffers from a degenerative muscular disease. The images show a body marked by the beginning of an inevitable and irreversible physical deterioration: muscle atrophy, fragility and loss of mobility.
Rather than adopting a clinical documentary approach, Mann treats the body with almost sculptural care. Light underscores volumes, folds and tensions. The illness is not aestheticized but integrated into a reflection on human vulnerability and dignity.
MATERIALITY AS THOUGHT
One of Sally Mann’s key contributions is the importance she places on photographic matter. Chemical runoff, stains and alterations are not defects to be corrected. They are part of the work’s meaning.
Using antique processes such as wet collodion acts in favour of the work, reinforcing the image’s materiality, underlining the material and unstable nature of photography. Chemical alterations become visible signs of time in action. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, her work reveals cycles: birth, transformation, disappearance. Each image captures a moment while simultaneously reminding us that all presence is transient. It questions the memory inscribed in places and bodies, transforming photography into a means of reflecting on the human condition. Photography somehow ceases to be merely a record of reality and becomes a physical object subject to chemical processes, accidents and imperfection.
This approach aligns her work with a pictorial tradition in which the material trace—the brushstroke, the drip, the impasto—is an integral part of the work. Sally Mann’s work therefore belongs to a photographic tradition that transcends mere representation.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH
The American South, a region steeped in tradition and mythology, occupies a central place in her imagination. This duality is evident in Sally Mann’s work: natural beauty and historical violence coexist. The landscape is never neutral; it is permeated by a complex collective memory.
One of the strengths of her work lies in the interplay between the intimate and the collective. The photographs of her children belong to the family sphere. However, they question universal themes such as childhood, vulnerability or identity construction. Similarly, the landscapes of Virginia allude to American national history, despite being linked to Mann’s personal history and sense of belonging to that territory. In this way, the intimate and the political are inextricably linked.
Sally Mann does not seek to illustrate a historical or theoretical discourse. She creates open images, inviting meditative interpretation. Each image is the result of a lengthy and arduous process. This temporal aspect of production is reflected in how the images are perceived: viewers are invited to look slowly.
Sally Mann’s work explores the relationship between time, memory and matter. Through landscapes of the American South, the faces of her children, her husband’s ailing body or her self-portraits, she examines human fragility and the enduring nature of traces.
GOSHEN: THE ZERO DEGREE OF COLOR
In the Goshen series (2025), Sally Mann quite literally pushes color to its furthest limits, even to its ultimate point of exhaustion and extinction. Here, color survives only as the residual idea of itself, a kind of afterimage or lingering trace.
The images of these abandoned places are haunted by the lives that once inhabited them. Everything seems to be slowly drained of its narrative substance, as though subjected to a silent hemorrhage. Nothing happens; things remain suspended, floating, in a state of dissolution.
The texture and almost pointillist density of the images evoke both the earliest autochromes and Turner’s Pictures of Nothing: matter held in suspension, atmosphere, the density of air, the vibration of light. Barely an oscillation. Color is out of breath; it fades away without the slightest regret.
Reality appears sparingly before gradually withdrawing, and the image slowly slips toward a form of abstraction, ultimately resolving into a nearly monochrome image of faintly tinted white. The imperceptible final breath of color inevitably recalls the paintings of Robert Ryman, where the erased trace of a former image still persists.
It is here that Mann reaches the zero degree of color.
