NEW YORK, NY.- In collaboration with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and accompanying its landmark 2010 exhibition, Aperture presents Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit (Aperture, November 2010), the first in-depth look at this world-renowned artist’s approach to the body. Throughout her career, Mann has fearlessly pushed her exploration of the human form, tackling often-difficult subject matter and making unapologetically sensual images that are simultaneously bold and lyrical.

This beautifully produced publication includes Mann’s earliest platinum prints from the late 1970s, Polaroid still lifes, early color work of her children, haunting landscape images, recent self-portraits, and nude studies of her husband. The series document Mann’s interest in the body as principal subject, with the associated issues of vulnerability and mortality lending an elegiac note to her images. In bringing them together, author and curator John Ravenal examines the varied ways in which Mann’s experimental approach, including ambrotypes and gelatin-silver prints made from collodian wet-plate negatives, moves her subjects from the corporeal to the ethereal.

Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit, a one-of-a-kind publication, is a must for any serious library of photographic literature, students, scholars, collectors, and others interested in her work. Ravenal has written a comprehensive introduction as well as individual entries on each series, and essays by David Levi Strauss (“Eros, Psyche, and the Mendacity of Photography”) and Anne Wilkes Tucker (“Living Memory”) add different, but equally illuminating perspectives to this work.

The book is accompanied by an exhibition of the same title that open at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This is the first exhibition VMFA has ever presented of one of Virginia’s most celebrated artists. The exhibition is curated by John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

SALLY MANN (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Mann’s many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), and Proud Flesh (2009). She lives in Lexington, Virginia.

JOHN RAVENAL (author) is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

DAVID LEVI STRAUSS (essay) is the chair of the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, New York.

ANNE WILKES TUCKER (essay) is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

9 x 11 ½ in. (22.9 x 29.2 cm)
200 pages, 1 six-page gatefold
225 four-color images
Clothbound with jacket
ISBN 978-1-59711-162-1
$55.00; £35.00

Copublished with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Exhibition Schedule: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, November 13, 2010-March 7, 2011.