Last chance to see - Sally Mann: The Family and the Land

American photographer Sally Mann’s first solo exhibition in the UK maps her long photographic career and combines work from her major series: Immediate Family, Motherland: Virginia, Deep South, Faces and What Remains. Together they chart the common thread that runs through all Mann’s work: her artistic impulse to draw on the world around her as subject matter.

Immediate Family, with which Mann first gained prominence for her work, and the newer series, Faces, both depict her children at various ages. Motherland: Virginia and Deep South, taken between 1993 and 1998, came directly after Immediate Family and focus on the land around her home and on locations steeped in historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Always one to court controversy, Mann’s most recent body of work, What Remains, is a series of studies of decay, from her beloved dog to bodies left to decompose in the woods for the purposes of forensic research. This final series brings together both strands of previous work, through its examination of how people eventually merge into the land itself. Typically using antique cameras and processes throughout her work, Mann accentuates the sense of atmosphere in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her printing process.

'Like Flaubert, the perfect one line of biography for me might be "she stayed at home and worked”', says Mann of her work. ‘The key is that I am at home and my work is about my love of place and my love of family. I have long sought to leave tangible evidence that this sweet and ordinary life is punctuated with moments of immortality.’

Sally Mann: The Family and the Land, closes on Sunday 19 September.