Editor’s Blog
Sally Mann

Sally Mann (in Time magazine, July 9, 2001)

As some of you know, I worked at Washington and Lee from 1970 to 1980, so most of my stories are from that decade after our graduation. Frank Parsons, who was President Huntley’s key lieutenant (their offices in Washington Hall were connected by a secret door), hired me to be the public relations director. Frank made the offer literally in Stonewall Jackson Cemetery, when I went back to Lexington for Dr. Crenshaw’s funeral.

In the ’70s Frank also hired Sally Mann to be the school photographer. Sally was the daughter of two of Lexington’s memorable characters: Dr. Robert Munger, the sage old physician, straight out of Mayberry by way of William S. Burroughs; and Betty Munger, who ran the W&L bookstore after Jane Rushing left. Because of her politics Mrs. Munger was known as Red Betty. (Still red, she died March 26 at the age of 91 in a Quaker retirement community in Pennsylvania.)

Sally is as idiosyncratic as her parents. She takes photos with 19th-century cameras, those big wooden ones you see in W.C. Fields movies, where the photographer drapes a blanket over her head. That’s why almost all her photos are black-and-white, and why they often have the kind of blemishes created by Civil War-era lenses, which in fact are something of a Sally Mann trademark. She went to Bennington and transferred to Hollins, studying English, not art. To this day I don’t know how Frank had the prescience to hire her. (I don’t really know why he hired me, either, except that he has always been a gambler, and his bets usually win. For example, he soundly beat me every Tuesday for 10 years, when a gang of us played poker.)

A spring-loaded, wrought-iron candle-thing made by Larry Mann in the ’70s (private collection)

No matter. Sally takes striking pictures. I’ll post some here until I get a cease-and-desist letter.

Raphine (north of Lexington), c. 1976 (private collection)

Which could conceivably come from her husband, Larry, a 1970 W&L philosophy graduate whose own story is just as cinematic. He’s a brilliant lawyer who didn’t go to law school. Instead he “read” the law, which means he apprenticed himself to an actual lawyer and passed the bar exam from sheer intellect and will power. Before that he had surely been W&L’s only-ever grad who became a fulltime blacksmith. Today he is, among other things, Lexington’s city attorney, a perennially talked-about possible candidate for the House of Representatives and a dictionary-picture dad.

Anyway. You’ve all doubtless heard of and read about Sally, although you might not know how she got her start. When W&L’s law building, Lewis Hall, was under construction she shot a series of amazing semi-abstract photos of it – whereupon the Corcoran Galley, in Washington, D.C., invited her to hang them there in a one-woman show.

Subsequently she began taking pictures of people – sometimes kids, not too different from the pictures all of you took of your children and their friends, except hers are better and they aren’t always about the good times. Many of them show her and Larry’s three children, Emmet, Jesse and Virginia. Others were of other children in Rockbridge County. In some of the pictures the kids are bee-stung, or asleep on a self-wet bed, or naked, although none of that ever was the point (childhood wounds and vulnerability were the point) – and the children always had a veto.

Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, 1989 (dust jacket of Immediate Family, Aperture Press, 1992)

Untitled (Deep South No. 9), 1998 (Cook Fine Art Gallery, New York City)

Soon Sally’s photos began to get published! Her breakthrough book was At Twelve (1988), about girls on the cusp of adolescence. You can imagine the furor. Then came Immediate Family (1992), What Remains (2003) and Deep South (2005). The latter two aren’t people books at all, and arguably they contain her most notable work, but they’re not what attracted the notoriety.

Because some of the pictures in Twelve and Family showed little kids without clothes, dark corners of the political world erupted. Virginia’s governor apocalyptically denounced the state museum when it mounted an exhibition of Sally’s photos. She was even  investigated in Finland, of all libertine places.

But saner brains found our W&L photographer’s images stunning, in a good way, and important. She’s now repped by Gagosian, than which there is no more august a gallery. Even if you can afford one of Steve Shepherd’s bicycles, a Sally Mann print may be out of reach. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Corcoran, among many others. She has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine not once but twice. In 2001 she was Time magazine’s photographer of the year, and its essay about her was written by Reynolds Price. What Remains, with a serene fixation on death, was the springboard for a 2006 HBO documentary (which more accurately is about the whole Mann family). Another film about Sally was nominated for an Oscar. Charlie Rose has interviewed her. Her life and oeuvre have even become the subject of a play, Some Things Are Private, produced by the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, which opened last month and has garnered enthusiastic reviews from the likes of the Boston Globe.

Cover image from Sally’s 1983 book, Second Sight. It has never been revealed until now that the arm belongs to Mame Warren, the noted photographic historian who edited Come Cheer, the gorgeous coffee-table book published in 1999 for W&L’s 250th anniversary.

From the left: Frank Parsons, the best boss I ever had; me; the brilliant Rom Weatherman, W&L’s publications chief, who died in 1984, whom I still miss every single day; and Sally Mann with Emmett. The photo was taken at the White Columns Inn in the early 1980s. I had hair then.

Sally and Larry now live out in Rockbridge County on 400 acres on the Maury River.

Pretty good for a townie who’s Red Betty’s daughter and was W&L’s 1970s school photographer, eh?

— Bob Keefe