The two virginia s mann sally photographer

If there is one medium over which the photographer Sally Mann has total command, it is the written word. She is a superb writer, having learned well from her favorite authors and poets, Nabokov, Faulkner, Welty, Rushdie, Eliot, and Pound.

The two virginia s mann sally photographer

Her particular gift is metaphor. Here, for instance, is Mann describing the drying blood on the frozen ground after a convicted sex offender who had escaped onto her farm was shot, killed, and hauled away: the blood puddle “shrank perceptibly, forming a brief meniscus before leveling off again, as if the earth had taken a delicate sip.”  

How can any photograph compete with a metaphor like that?

But this very task – using photography as an instrument for metaphor-making, for connecting one thing to another, across lines of time and race and through the space separating the living from the dead – seems to be a large part of what Mann has aimed to do in the 40-plus years of her photographic career, a career that’s now being celebrated with a re