Sally Mann is an American photographer born 1951 in southwest Virginia where she still lives. Her best and main work centers on her own home and her children Emmett, Jesse and Virginia during the years 1984-95. These pictures have caused some controversies since they deal with children growing up and depict them as part children, part adult — and sometimes nude or seminude. Sally Mann lets her children pose for the images, they decide what they want to look like and Mann makes the picture. She does all the photographing during the summer, and spends the winter making her own prints. She favors turn-of-the-century, large-format cameras and has studied and mastered nineteenth-century techniques.
Some art critics, either very conservative or very politically correct, see Sally Mann as an proverbial evil mother that earns her reputation to making pornography using her own children, although the vast majority believes her to be one of the truly great living American artists. Mann herself has stated that she just photographs what’s around her, and that her focus is on exploring the American south as both subject and motif of her images.
She has published a lot of her photographs in books, most notably "At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women" 1988, "Immediate Family" 1992 and "Still Time" 1994.