Sally Mann was born and raised in Virginia and is best known for early photographs documenting the lives of her three young children and, later, for her evocative wet-plate collodion images of landscapes in the Deep South. Never having received any formal training, Mann was encouraged by her father at an early age to take up the large format cameras that she continues to work with today. After graduating from Hollins College in 1975, one of her first jobs was as a photographer at Washington and Lee University, where she made a number of surrealist-inspired architectural views that resulted in a portfolio entitled Second Sight (1984). Her next publication project was At Twelve, which centered on the faces and postures of young women captured at that alternately beautiful and awkward moment of transition between childhood and adulthood. The controversy that grew in response to these unvarnished and somewhat discomfiting photographs of twelve-year-old girls eventually turned out to be mild compared to the powerful public reaction to Mann’s Immediate Family pictures initially exhibited in 1990 and published in 1992. Immediate Family records a decade-long collaboration between Mann and her children—Jessie, Emmett, and Virginia—that resulted in an intimate, unflinching, and sensual series of photographs.

This striking black-and-white portrait of her eldest daughter Jessie, her arms akimbo and seen from behind, is one of the last and most iconic of the Immediate Family pictures. Wearing white underwear with her hair pinned up in coiled braids, Jessie appears here as a strong -- though still young -- girl gazing into a hazy, undifferentiated landscape, as if somehow witnessing the future. Vinland (1992) will be the sixth work by Sally Mann, an artist that Time magazine named “America’s best photographer” in 2001, to enter the collection.

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