Virginia at Prayer 1991

Sally Mann made this photograph, Virginia at Prayer, using a large format camera and black and white film. The softness of the image tells me that Mann isn’t just pointing and shooting, she's coaxing the light. There's so much happening here, but what I keep coming back to is the fence. It's not just a barrier, it’s a filter through which we see these girls, and maybe how they see themselves. The girl at prayer is framed, almost trapped, while the other is both in and out of the picture. It reminds me of the way we construct images, and how images construct us. Mann’s work often plays with the tension between innocence and experience, and it reminds me of Diane Arbus, who also looked for the strange in the everyday. Neither artist gives us easy answers, but they invite us to look deeper into the stories we tell ourselves about childhood, memory, and representation.