In the luminous halls of Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, a remarkable treasure has emerged from the archives of one of America's most penetrating photographic voices. Long renowned for her evocative work exploring themes of family, identity, and the American South, Sally Mann has unearthed previously unreleased photographs from her seminal series At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. Reflecting on this rediscovery, Mann noted with characteristic insight, "One of the advantages of a long life is that you get to go back and revisit parts of your work that were overlooked, sometimes inexplicably, in early years."
These images offer us a fresh glimpse into her masterful exploration of that most delicate of transitions – the threshold between childhood and womanhood. Mann herself described the essence of her subjects perfectly in her original publication: "What knowing watchfulness in the eyes of a twelve-year-old... at once guarded, yet guileless. She is the very picture of contradiction: on the one hand diffident and ambivalent, on the other forthright and impatient; half pertness and half pout. Impossibly, she is both artless and sophisticated, a child and yet a woman."