I don't really think about Sally Mann when I look at her famous photographs—-and I'm emphatically not using the word “infamous”—of her prepubescent daughters from the early 90s. When I look at those portraits, I think about the girls themselves. Partly, I think, it's because I was once one of them, a 12-year-old existing in that truly bizarre, extraordinary, liminal space between childhood and adulthood. It seems to me that it's a period of a time in which self-definition makes its earliest and often furtive marks.
I was reading a really interesting book recently that contained the following Carl Jung quote, which for some reason I’m thinking about right now. “The world will ask you who you are,” he writes, “and if you don't know, the world will tell you.” When I see these portraits, I see very, very young women being asked by the world who they are.
It’s something of a pity that Mann is routinely referred to and defined by these photographs, because when they were published, the zeitgeist decided to perceive them as exploitative and inappropriate. In fact, I’m even a little disappointed that I’m choosing to write about her in the context of those images. But maybe what I'm doing is choosing to recast that definition into this one: Sally Mann is the photographer who shot lovingly-created, sensitive, attentive portraits of her daughters while they were in the act of telling the world who they were.
-Eugenie Dalland