Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit is the artist's first thematic survey focusing on her thirty-year exploration of the human form, tackling often difficult subject matter and making unapologetically sensual images that are simultaneously bold and lyrical. In collaboration with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and accompanying its landmark exhibition opening November 13, 2010, Aperture is pleased to publish the first in-depth look at this world-renowned artist's approach to the body.

This beautifully produced publication includes Mann's earliest platinum prints from the late 1970s, Polaroid still lifes, early color work of her children, haunting landscape images, recent self-portraits, and nude studies of her husband. The series document Mann's interest in the body as principal subject, with the associated issues of vulnerability and mortality lending an elegiac note to her images.

In bringing them together, author and curator John Ravenal examines the varied ways in which Mann's experimental approach, including ambrotypes and gelatin-silver prints made from collodian wet-plate negatives, moves her subjects from the corporeal to the ethereal.

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Mann's many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh And The Spirit (2010). She lives in Lexington, Virginia.

John Ravenal (author) is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

David Levi Strauss (essay) is the chair of the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, New York.

Anne Wilkes Tucker (essay) is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.