Sally Mann
Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children and the only daughter. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Her second collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, published in 1988, stimulated minor controversy. The images captured the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls and the expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images. Mann’s photographs don’t glamorise the world, but they don’t make it into something more unpleasant than it is, either. The girls photographed in this series are shown vulnerable in their youthfulness but Mann instead focuses on the strength that the girls possess.