Sally Mann

These photos are all part of an assignment for which I was to choose a photographer to emulate. I chose to emulate Sally Mann. Even though many critics have criticized her work as it can often seem disturbing and/or controversial, I love the quality of her photography and I think that her work is stunning aesthetically and on a deeper level. Mann often uses her children as her models and, in her portfolios that I studied, she focuses on adolescents and their raw beauty. With my images, I tried to capture that raw beauty by placing my subjects in natural environments and using natural lighting.

For this assignment, I used a large format film camera, similar to one Mann used, and focused on shooting young girls like Mann did in her second collection published in 1988 titled At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women and like she did in her third collection, Immediate Family, published in 1992 with images of her children. These are the first six images I did for this collection and there are more to come. I hope you like these images as much as I liked making them.