Sally Mann is an American photographer who courted controversy with her ‘family life‘ series, due to nude depictions of her children growing up at their home in Virginia. And whether the photographs overtly sexualised children.
I haven’t included those shots here, but if you want to, you can see them by visiting Sally Mann’s website. In my opinion they are beautiful and sensitive. And many of us will recognise moments like them from our own children growing up. The controversy isn’t really about child nudity but more about consent to put them in the public domain.
Regardless of this, Mann’s work is challenging, provocative and defiant. And her compositions raise more questions than answers. Below is a selection of powerful shots I wanted to share with the class.
David Milligan-Croft
Thereisnocavalry 
I remember seeing Sally Mann in 1998 at UNC-Greensboro where I think I saw some of these images before; it was prior to my knowledge that police, developers and lawyers run campaigns on tenants throughout the city and into Catawba County if you have a big mouth about it like I do–Nancy Vaughan knows all about it (one of other lectures I saw around that time I also remember–it was this guy who used old swinger’s mags for collages of some sort–that one didn’t go so well, especially during the Q&A where the women in the audience had a lot of questions, they had huge issues with his material–it soon became uncomfortably clear that showing his “art” there was a really bad idea from the start) aw