ABOUT

For more than four decades, Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work - including figure studies, landscapes, and architectural views - is that it is all bred of a place, the American South. Fully immersed in its literary and visual culture, Mann - a native of Lexington, Virginia - has long written about what it means to live in the South and to be identified as a southerner.

Using her deep love of her homeland and her knowledge of its fraught heritage, she asks powerful, provocative questions - about history, identity, race, and religion - that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Presenting essays both personal and scholarly, this richly illustrated monograph constitutes an in-depth exploration of the evolution of Mann's art, with more than one hundred photographs, including several previously unpublished ones. 'Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings" considers how Mann's relationship with her native land has shaped her work and how the legacy of the South - as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground - continues to inform American identity and experience.