Photographer Sally Mann has never shied away from depicting a raw portrait of the South. She portrays the beauty and battlegrounds below the Mason-Dixon Line. Mann is also known for intimate photographs of her children on her Lexington, Virginia, farm. The exhibition “Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings,” is on view now at the High Museum.
“The exhibition is a look at 40 years of Sally Mann’s career through the lens of her relationship to the South. It looks at how she’s explored the South and interrogated it, and how the South has both shaped the person she is, but also the art she creates,” curator Sarah Kennel said.
Once visitors enter the first floor of the exhibit, they are greeted with two floor-to-ceiling enlarged portraits. One photograph is of her family floating down a river in a canoe in Lexington. Parallel to that photograph is one that Mann didn’t print until this exhibition. It’s of her husband, turned away from the camera, burning the grass on their farm to turn over the land for the next season of growth.
