Copyright 2010 Sally Mann
Photographer: Sally Mann (b. & resides in Virginia) USA
Publisher: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) & Aperture Foundation
Author: John B. Ravenal, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA)
Essays: John B. Ravenal, David Levi Strauss, Anne Wilkes Tucker
Text: English
Hardcover book with dust jacket, sewn binding, four-color lithography, Exhibition History, Bibliography, Index, printed in Singapore
Photobook designer: John Hoar
Notes: This is a photobook that although bears similarities to a retrospective, is a collective body of work by Sally Mann that was earlier exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. To paraphrase the book’s author, “One of the apparent paradoxes in Mann’s work is her desire to show what lies beyond vision by using a medium invented to record reality’s surfaces”. Mann’s recent work with the Ambrotype and Collodion wet plate photographic processes provide her with more opportunities for “chance events” to occur that push her images further into abstraction. For me, there is a strong undercurrent of melancholy in her photographs that span the last forty years, while Mann states that her contemplation is on “Memory, Loss, Time and Love”.
Cheers
PhotoBook Journal 
This may be weird, but this is hauntingly beautiful.
I think that describing her photographs as “hauntingly beautiful” encapsulates her body of work very elegantly words. Thanks!