Sally Mann

(1951–)
is an American Photographer best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.

One image of her 4-year-old daughter (Virginia at 4) was censored by the Wall Street Journal with black bars over her eyes, nipples and pubic area. Mann herself considered these photographs to be “natural through the eyes of a mother, since she has seen her children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry and even naked.” Critics agreed, saying her “vision in large measure [is] accurate, and a welcome corrective to familiar notions of youth as a time of unalloyed sweetness and innocence,” and that the book (1988) “created a place that looked like Eden, then cast upon it the subdued and shifting light of nostalgia, sexuality and death.”