Showing at Jackson Fine Art through March 29 is Sally Mann’s “At Twelve,” a revisitation of her 1980s iconic series of 12-year-old girls in Rockbridge County, Virginia.
A glimpse into the world of female adolescents living in the South, it features previously unreleased photographs from work shot between 1983 and 1985 and published in book form in 1988. These new selections are thoughtful and provocative, allowing us to consider how they set the stage for Mann’s long career.
Mann lives high in the pantheon of Southern photographers — her elegiac images of her family, community and Southern environs deservedly venerated. They have also sometimes been mired in controversy due to Mann occasionally showing her subjects nude.
Her work has often been shown in Atlanta, including “A Thousand Crossings,” a major exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum that was mounted at the High Museum of Art in late 2019 (and sadly shuttered in early 2020 because of a leaky roof). Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Art has been featuring her work since 1996.
In other words, Mann is a superstar.
