Accompanying the exhibition Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, this richly illustrated monograph constitutes an in-depth exploration of the evolution of Mann's art through five sections: "Family," "The Land," "Last Measure," "Abide with Me," and "What Remains." Plate sections are enriched by the inclusion of quotations by Mann herself and by her most beloved authors. Curators Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel analyze Mann's photographic development in essays exploring her literary interests and family photographs, respectively. In their valuable contributions, Hilton Als, staff writer at the New Yorker and recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism; Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Drew Gilpin Faust, President and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, explore literary and photographic responses to racism in the South; Mann's debt to nineteenth-century photographers and techniques; and the landscape as repository of cultural and personal memory.

For more than forty years, Sally Mann (b. 1951) 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—portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies—is that it is all “bred of a place,” the American South. Mann, who is a native of Lexington, Virginia, uses her deep love of her homeland and her knowledge of its historically fraught heritage to ask powerful, provocative questions—about history, identity, race, and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Including many works not previously exhibited or published, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings is a sweeping overview of Mann’s artistic achievements.

The publication accompanies the internationally touring exhibition Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, from March 4 to May 28, 2018; Peabody Essex Museum from June 30 to September 23, 2018; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from November 20, 2018, to February 10, 2019; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 3 to May 27, 2019; Jeu de Paume, Paris, June 17 to September 22, 2019; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from October 19, 2019, to January 12, 2020.

Sarah Greenough is senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Sarah Kennel was The Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum.