Sally Mann, photographer and writer

·52 min·5 clips

Sally Mann describes how her photos were seized from a Texas gallery, warning of rising censorship against artists.

Sally Mann arrives through family and place. Lauren Laverne introduces her as a photographer and writer whose work keeps circling her own story, her children, and the American South. The childhood scenes are sharp. Mann was born in 1950s Virginia into a bohemian household, with a country doctor father who collected modern art and gave her a first camera. That camera leads back to boarding school, rebellion, and the first serious tries at looking outward with purpose. Harlan County comes in softly. Mann remembers working there as a nurse's assistant and trying to show what real poverty looked like. She is plain about the results. None of the pictures were very successful, she says, but the need to make images speak was already there. Literature almost took over. After college, where she earned the highest distinction possible in literature, Mann wanted to be a poet. Practical life had other plans. Poetry would not pay, so photography became the skill that could. The early jobs sound bleakly ordinary: university headshots, football team photographs, ceremonial handshake pictures. Boring, miserable work. Still, repetition taught her craft before the family work and the Lexington farm brought praise and censure. Larry Mann shifts the mood. Laverne returns to Mann's line about meeting him as if the universe gave her a pass. Mann remembers choosing quickly. Across the room, while he paid no attention, she fixed on him and proposed within the first month. The story is sweet without turning syrupy. After 55 years of marriage, Larry still seems to arrive in the room all at once.

As heard by us

A photographer's career begins with failed pictures, dull assignments, sudden love, and a family history marked by violence.

Sally Mann's working life comes through as a mix of ambition, paid assignments, and family history. She wanted to be a poet, turned to photography because she needed to earn a living, and slowly got better through university headshots and grip-and-grin jobs she found boring and…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for Sally Mann on early photographs that did not quite work, the poet's life she could not afford, and the room where Larry Mann became instantly inevitable.

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