d glowing, ghostly abstractions set in the framing dark. In works in Mann's recent "Georgia" series, on the other hand, the photographer reversed the lens to produce a misted effect at the center of her evocative landscapes. In this most recent series Mann employed several means of partially obscuring, rather than abstracting, her ostensible subjects and evoked a historicizing iconography that had not previously been a feature of her work.
Throughout her career Mann's work has also been marked by a very strong sense of place. As a photographer of, primarily, family, neighbors, and local sites, Mann's connection to the place where she has lived almost her entire life is invariably mentioned by commentators. She was born, in 1951, and raised in the "singularly unspoiled community" of Lexington, Virginia and her "rootedness in this place and its people" are often cited as the source of her vision (Livingston, 1983, p. ix). Mann herself stresses the sense of continuity she derives from her lifelong residence in southwestern Virginia. In several cases in her introduction to Immediate family (1992) she cited photographic evidence for this continuity--a demonstration of the manner in which she sees her life and her art as inextricably connected. In the introduction to that work Mann recounted finding a glass-plate negative from the previous century that depicted cliffs near one of her homes. "I printed it and held it up against the present reality, and the trees and caves and stains on the rock are identical" (1992, n. p.).
Family photographs also confirm the continuity of this "rare world" where slow changes have "gracefully preserved the land in a near time-warp" (Mann, 1988, p. 13). Mann, for example, included a photograph of her six-year-old self wearing the same dress that is featured in the 1986 "Easter Dress" in Immediate family (1992, n. p.). But such pictures supply far more than visual proof of the continuity. They...