Sally Mann

Sally Turner Munger (Sally Mann) was the youngest of three children born to Robert Munger, a doctor who drove around Lexington, Virginia. Sally's primary maternal figure, however, was her nanny, an African-American woman named Virginia Carter who took day-to-day care of Sally and her siblings. She described her childhood, during which she usually played unclothed, as "'unconventional', 'rural' and 'near-feral'", adding that, we were "middle class but bohemian: no church, no country club, no television". Having inherited his love of photography, Sally would borrow her father's 5×7 camera (which may account for her preference for large format photography in her professional career). He also bought his daughter her first Leica (35mm hand-held) camera. In 1969, Sally graduated from the Putney School, a private boarding school in Vermont. While at Putney, she signed up to a photography module (though she later admitted that her primary motivation was to be able to be alone with her boyfriend in the darkroom). One of her first photographic works was a nude portrait of a classmate. She then attended Bennington College, , where she studied with South African photographer and filmmaker, Norman Sieff. Having met him a year earlier at Bennington, Sally took the initiative and proposed to Larry Mann, a blacksmith/trainee attorney, who was three years her senior. Sally and Larry Mann were married in 1970. Mann studied briefly at Friends World College, a small independent liberal arts institution that later merged with Long Island University (later Friends World Program). She then enrolled at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia, from where she graduated with first class honors, in 1974. The following year she earned an MA in creative writing, also from Hollins. Soon after graduating a second time, Mann worked as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University, documenting the construction of the school's new law school building, the Lewis Hall. This led to Mann's first solo exhibition in 1977 at Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the publication of her, "Lewis Law Portfolio" (1977). In 1979 Mann gave birth to the first of her three children. As art critic Richard B. Woodward explains, "Her solution to the demands of motherhood, which have eaten away at the schedules of artistic women throughout the ages, was ingenious: with her children as subjects, making art became a kind of childcare". Emmett (who later served in the peace keeping corps of the military) was followed, respectively, in 1981 and 1985, by two daughters, Jessie and Virginia. Emmett suffered three significant brain injuries (the first when he was hit by a car as in childhood, and the two others resulting from accidents in adulthood) and was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Said Mann, "We don't know if the injuries caused it, or exacerbated it, or if it was genetic".