Episode #208: Photographer Sally Mann reflects on the life of Virginia Franklin Carter (1894–1994), an African American woman who helped raise the artist and her two brothers in Lexington, Virginia. "My parents were important but Virginia may have been the single most important person in my life," says Mann, who named her youngest daughter after Carter. They are pictured together in Mann's series "The Two Virginias." Mann interviewed Carter's children for her forthcoming memoir "Hold Still," due out in May 2015. Mann writes: "Left with six children and a public education system for which she paid taxes but which forbade classes for black children beyond the seventh grade, Gee-Gee managed somehow to send each of them to out-of-state boarding schools and, ultimately, to college." Featured in addition to "The Two Virginias" are images from Mann's "Deep South" series and her photograph "Virginia Asleep" (1988).

Sally Mann's early "Immediate Family" photographs were of her three children and husband. In her more recent series of landscapes of the deep South, Mann uses damaged lenses to make images marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process as it developed during the 19th century.

Learn more about the artist at:
http://www.art21.org/artists/sally-mann

ART21 "Exclusive" is supported, in part, by 21c Museum Hotel and by individual contributors.

CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interviewer: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Morgan Riles. Artwork Courtesy: Sally Mann. Archival Photography Courtesy: Sally Mann & The Carter Family. Theme Music: Peter Foley.