When I was 15, I took a photography class at my local Arts Council. There, I found a box with copies of Sally Mann’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. I was drawn to the photographs instantly and took one home with me. This was my first experience with Sally Mann’s photography. She has been one of my favorite photographers ever since. Her black and white photographs are usually of her family and people in her hometown of Lexington, Virginia. I am attracted to her ability to show emotion through her images. Each image shows the soul of the subject.
Her collection At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women had a special connection for me as a teenage girl. I had never seen the subject of twelve-year old girls treated seriously by an artist before. As a budding young artist myself at the time, I was entranced. The images in the collection show a poetic, darker side to the almost-teenage girl. The mixture of childhood and womanhood is apparent in different ways in each photograph. Mann does not hide the reality of the twelve-year-old girls lives. Some are trying hard to be grown up, some have a child’s face in a young woman’s body, some nonchalantly exist in their world, and one has her own baby in her room of baby dolls. Each portrait shows a girl who is not afraid to look back at the viewer.
Ann Beattie writes in the introduction, "These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose- what adults make of that pose may be the issue." Looking at these images, many of them make people feel uncomfortable. What gaze are we looking at these girls? Are we seeing them as children lost in an adult world? Do we see them as objects of beauty? Do we see them as being taken advantage of in their innocence? Our adult perceptions of the images Sally Mann shows us can quickly change their stories from gentle to violent. The way we look at these girls on the cusp of adolescence shows us how they will be looked at and treated in their lives. The photographs show them, naïve as they exist among their daily world, and we all know that innocence will soon be shattered.
At Twelve: Portraits of Women. Photographs by Sally Mann. Introduction by Ann Beattie. Aperture/New Images, New York, 1988.
