© Sally Mann Photograph: Sally Mann, from the series At Twelve, 1983-1985 © Sally Mann, 2024; from Sally Mann: At Twelve (Aperture, 2024) © 1988 and 2024 Sally Mann
You can see a whole world – submerged, waiting, ready to burst forth – in the face of any adolescent girl. In Sally Mann’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, she captures this special, unstable time of life. In this image, a plaited-haired girl sits in a chair, head in hand like a world-weary grownup. This is Olivia, “with that ruined prayer in her eyes”, as Mann describes her. In the background, a phalanx of dark trousers hangs from two washing lines that cut across the image and lead our gaze towards her grandmother, who dangles the now-empty plastic laundry basket over one shoulder.
“This is just half the day’s laundry,” Mann tells us in a loose narrative that runs through a reissue of the well-known 1988 publication by the artist notorious for capturing girls on the threshold of womanhood with unnerving perspicacity. The youthful gamines, locals of Mann’s own back yard of Rockbridge County, Virginia, are by turns funny, glamorous, knowing, evasive, worried, rich, poor, babyish, frighteningly mature – all of the complexities we know girlhood and its projections to hold, but sometimes find difficult to behold.
