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“That’s what [James] Baldwin was getting at – he’s saying most people don’t want to go into those dark places. What you [Mann] are doing is really rare. And I don’t say that to praise you – this is what you should be doing. You’re asking your viewers to take a journey to a place where there’s no reassurance of conclusion or closure.” —Dr. John Edwin Mason

“Or, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to be comfortable, because it’s never an artist’s job to make viewers feel comfortable. My job is to make you think.” —Sally Mann

Photographer Sally Mann (b. 1951, Lexington, VA), widely considered one of the greatest photographers of her generation, is currently the subject of a traveling retrospective A Thousand Crossings, now on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (through September 22, 2019). Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Peabody Essex Museum, it has also made stops at the Getty in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and its final stop will be at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. A foundational aspect of the exhibition is the group of series that Mann started in the early 2000s and she now collectively refers to as Abide With Me. In sometimes touching, sometimes searing photographs, the series considers how slavery and segregation left their mark on the landscape of Virginia and, in turn, shaped Mann’s own childhood and identity.

Adding further insight to the Abide With Me series, this video, shared by the Peabody Essex Museum, includes Mann in conversation with several of the subjects and subject’s family members from the photographs, as well as with professors Dr. Maurice Wallace and Dr. John Edwin Mason of the University of Virginia, on the impact and importance of Mann’s work.