Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. She received a BA from Hollins College in 1974, and an MA in writing from the same school in 1975. Her books of photographs include “Immediate Family;” “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women;” "Deep South;" "What Remains," and “Mother Land: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia.” Perhaps her most famous work is her early series of photographs of her three children and husband, called “Immediate Family.” These often controversial images portray her three young children in what might be described as "Southern clichés: tobacco spit, skinned squirrels, an old pickup truck, swimming holes, lush wet landscapes" (Carol Maver, Indyweek.com) and explore vulnerability and the loss of innocence that accompanies growing up. Her recent landscapes of Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, and Mississippi tackle a similar theme, capturing the wilderness untouched by human destruction. Using damaged lenses and a camera that requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus, revealing her interest in antique cameras and early photographic processes. Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine in 2001; she has also been a Guggenheim fellow and a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has been the subject of two documentaries: "Blood Ties" (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and "What Remains" (2007). Major solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Mann's photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), the High Museum (Atlanta), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), among many others.