Acclaimed photographer Sally Mann is sounding the alarm about what she calls a "new era of culture wars" after police seized several of her decades-old photographs depicting her children from a Texas museum earlier this year. The incident marks an unprecedented escalation in censorship battles over artistic expression in the United States, with Mann warning that artists now live in fear of having their work confiscated by law enforcement.
The controversy erupted in January when police removed four photographs from Mann's celebrated "Immediate Family" series from the walls of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. The black-and-white images, which have been exhibited in major cultural institutions worldwide for more than 30 years, include intimate family scenes such as a toddler sleeping on a bed she had wet and Mann's son with a melting popsicle dripping on his lower body. The seizure came after the Danbury Institute, a conservative Christian advocacy group, accused the museum of displaying "child pornography" in a December 2024 open letter.
"Children cannot consent to such photography, and displaying these images publicly only perpetuates their exploitation," the advocacy group stated, demanding the photographs be removed. "Such actions degrade the values of our community, endanger the innocence of childhood and contribute to a dangerous cultural shift." The group received backing from local elected officials in their campaign against the exhibition.
For Mann, who described the police action as "awful" and "shocking," the seizure represents a dangerous new precedent. Despite the controversy that has surrounded her work since the 1990s culture wars, this marked the first time her prints had ever been physically removed from a public institution by law enforcement. A Texas grand jury ultimately declined to bring charges against either Mann or the museum, and the prints were later returned to her gallery, though they remained out of the exhibition for the rest of its run.
The 74-year-old photographer, speaking from her studio at her Virginia home called Three Graces in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, reflects on these events in her new memoir "Art Work," a follow-up to her first book "Hold Still." In the memoir, she reveals her own increasing caution, describing herself as "risk-averse fundamentally, and more so now." She even admits to being a "chicken" for not including a 1995 photograph called "Three Graces" in the book - an image of herself and her daughters that she describes as "a guaranteed gut-flutterer but illegal as hell" if deemed child pornography.
Art history professor Amy Werbel from the Fashion Institute of Technology notes that the Fort Worth incident has no recent precedent in the United States, though it echoes a period between 1873 and 1915 when "police empowered by anti-obscenity statutes" regularly removed artwork from galleries and public spaces. The much-publicized 1990 obscenity trial involving Robert Mapplethorpe's explicit photographs ended with an acquittal for Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center, though the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., dropped a planned exhibit.
"We're entering a new era of culture wars, I'm quite sure. And I think the people who are pursuing this are much more sophisticated and have many more tools at hand," Mann said, pointing to social media as one such powerful new weapon. She predicts more attacks on art by people who may not understand the work they're criticizing but recognize its cultural power and influence.
Mann's concerns have been amplified by recent political developments. The Trump administration has announced plans to audit exhibitions and holdings at eight Smithsonian Institution museums to determine whether they align with what it calls the "President's directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions." In a social media post, Trump specifically called out museums as "the last remaining segment of 'WOKE'" and indicated plans to expand the review beyond the Smithsonian.
Lindsey Halligan, the lawyer leading the Smithsonian review for the White House and Trump's nominee for top federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia, rejected characterizations that history is being rewritten. She told NPR that the executive order aims to "depoliticize our nation's museums and ensure the Smithsonian presents history with balance, integrity and openness." However, citing the Fort Worth controversy, Halligan said she believes Mann's photography should "never be in a federally funded institution like the Smithsonian."
The controversy surrounding Mann's work centers on her unvarnished depictions of everyday family life in her "Immediate Family" series. Created over years of photographing her three children - Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia - on their isolated 800-acre property outside Lexington, Virginia, the images show children sometimes nude, striking defiant poses, dealing with bloody noses, insect bites, and other realities of childhood. Mann estimates taking more than 4,000 shots for the series, with only around 60 ever printed or shown publicly.
"I don't want to be known as the controversial photographer," Mann said with a heavy sigh. She notes the irony that while she has photographed the site of Emmett Till's murder, corpses, and her husband's body weakened by muscular dystrophy, she has only faced significant backlash for her intimate family portraits. "Nevermind that Jesus Christ is portrayed any number of times in great paintings nude, and there are little putti [chubby winged children] peeing into fountains right and left in every Italian garden," she observed.
Mann's artistic process involves using antique large-format cameras and developing her own prints, often embracing imperfections and accidents that create dreamlike, mysterious images. She works with wet-plate collodion, a photographic process dating back two centuries, in a separate studio cabin on her property. Her dedication to craft extends to using equipment salvaged from dumpsters, including a valuable enlarger and a Deardorff camera that travels with her in the back of her car.
"That's always been a motivation for me - to try and somehow meld loss and beauty and mystery and irony and memory and nostalgia and all that is rolled together in the South," Mann explained. "It has to be beautiful - because if we're going to persist as a species, we need beauty." Her work has evolved from family portraits to southern landscapes, Civil War battlefields, and places connected to slavery and the Underground Railroad.
The personal stakes for Mann have grown more complex following the death of her son Emmett at age 36 after struggling with schizophrenia in adulthood. Her new memoir is dedicated to him with the words "O lost, and by the wind grieved." Now focusing on the James River and Point Comfort, where the first ship carrying enslaved people arrived in 1619, Mann continues to explore what she calls the complexity underlying southern history, including racism and slavery.
The current political climate has forced Mann to reconsider practical decisions about her artistic legacy. She is reconsidering plans to donate her estate to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts because it receives public funding. "The ripples of this new regime are far-reaching, even reached to little old me. I don't know what to do," she said. "Even if they held them and took perfect care of them and the prints themselves weren't at any risk, the funding for the museum might be at risk."
Despite the challenges, Mann's career continues to flourish internationally. Hardly a month passes without a show featuring her work somewhere in the world, and a major traveling survey is planned for next year with stops in Asia and South America. In 2027, the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in New York will host an exhibition of her "Marital Trust" series. Her new memoir, "Art Work," offers practical advice to emerging artists, emphasizing that recognition took her 20 years to achieve and that artists must be prepared to work in obscurity while developing their craft over time.
"If it's good enough work, irrespective of how many rejections you've had - it will be received. It will be seen eventually," Mann assured aspiring artists. "I truly believe that you can live in upstate Wisconsin. You can live in Arkansas. You can live in Appalachia like I do. And if your work is good enough, it won't be ignored." However, she acknowledges uncertainty about whether she would make her family photographs public if she were starting her career today, given the current climate of cultural and political tensions surrounding artistic expression.
