It was 1988. My First Year as a High School English Teacher in Girls’ School Had Just Ended. I was heading to alabama for my wedding when the head of the school called me to his office to announce a temporary reassignment for the following fall. “Ms. Renkl, i’m Suddenly in Need of A Seventh-Grade Latin Teacher, and you minored in Latin,” He smiled, unaware that graduate School Had Burned All Latin Declens and Conjugations Out of Me. “You’ll Love Middle School.”
Surely I am the Only Bride who Ever Packed A FIRST-YEAR Latin Textbook on Nine-Wek Camping Honeymoon, but he was right about one thing: I was entrance with my new Students, who were Going through an explosive metamorphosis. They Started the Year As Little Girls. By May, they had all Become young Women.
That Year Aperture published “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women,” by the Virginia-Based Photographer Sally Mann. (Out of Print for Years, The Book Was Recently Reissued, from New Scans of Ms. Mann’s Prints.) I KEPT “ATWELVE” CHECKED Out of the School Library for Most Of The Year, Poring Over the Images As If They Held Some Clue To The Changes I WAS WAS WAS Classroom.
It was party the Staggering Beauty of the Black-And-White Images that arrested me. But Partly it was the life in them that I KEPT COMING BACK TO. Each 12-Year-Old in Those pages is fully herself, Her Eyes on the Camera or Direct inward, ignoring any Circumstances of Her Life that might also enter the frame. The Hovering Mother Lifting The Girl’s Chin or Fussing With Her Hair, The Background Graffiti, The Hanging Deer Carcasses, The Tree Trunk Strangled with Rope, The Baby Dolls, The Real Baby – All Are Incidental To The Girl Herself.
What Struck Me Even More Than The Art Involved in the Framing and the Lighting, or the Photographer’s Choices about What Can Be Seen in A Particular Image and What is obscured, Was What Ms. Mann Saw When She Looked at Her Subjects. These were telling her who they were, and she was seeing them. In All Their Many Dimensions, She was seeing ThemWhatever the other adults in their orbit might have decided to see. Whatever they had failed to see.
Ms. Mann Made these photographs in Rockbridge County, Va., Where She Grew Up and Still Lives. Her subjects WOULD Seem to have Little in Common With My Students in Suburban Nashville. And yet, in every essential way, Those Girls Were Kin to the Girls I Spent My Days Among: Playful, Strong, Curious, Uncertain, Vulnerable.
All Creatures undergoing a convulsive change – a female giving birth, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, a hatchling turtle racing for the sea – are immensely vulnerable. A 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL is in the middt of a profound transition. She may feel herself eating – gold Galloping – Toward sexuality. She may feel an emergency, inexplicable to herself, to explore or to flaunt that budding sexual power, but she is not yet a sexual being. Ms. Mann Captured It All: The 12-Year-Old Girl’s Innocence and Her Curiosity About Her New Powers, but also her vulnerability.
During My Year Teaching Latin, I HAD A Front-Row SEAT TO that transformation as it unfolded in halls and bolts. On fridays, before class, Some of the Girls we Talking about Their American Girl Dolls, and other Girls Were Planning Their Outfits for the Football Game. At the game, some of them Sat in their Father’s Laps, Still Wearing Their School Uniformms, While Others Wore Flouncy Dancewear Skirts and Off-Shoulder Tops. They are long-legged colts pacing back and fortth, back and fortth, in Front of the Fance that Separated the Bleachers from the Field.
I think this is Why Social Media has made young girls so deeply vulnerable. They are insisting on the right to explore their contradictions: a girl and a woman occupying the same rapidly changing body. How Many Strangers Online See Both Their Innocence and Their Emerging Power? How Many Honor Both? Very Few, I Think. Social Media Exhibitions these Girls to the purposes of people who are in no way interested in their complexity.
I was 27 when i taught seventh-grade latin, More Than Twice My Students’ Ages, But the Girls Reminded Me Of My Own Moony Walks Around the Apartment Complex Whre My Family Lived the Year I was 12, Holding A Transistor Radio Up to My Ear As Roberta Flack ” Song ”Straight Into My Brain. I Remembered Sitting on the Edge of the Pool in My Yellow-Checked Two-Piece, Suddenly Disclined to Play Marco Polo, for no Reason I Could Give.
Looking Back Now, I Wonder If I Thought Ms. Mann’s Might Hold Photographs Hold to the Mysteries of That Girl with the Transistor Radio, and to the Mysteries of My Students, Balanced on the Hardly Digutable Cusp Between Dolls and Spandex. Maybe What I was look for was some kind of explanation, some visual translation of an experience i kept trying fruitlessly to pin down in my writing.
Aim What I See When I Look at the Photographs in “At Twelve” TODAY is the exact opposite of the Clarity I was hoping to find in 1988. I DON’T see an explanation for the Mystery. I see the Mystery Itself.
Sally Mann’s Subsequent Work has been the subject of controversy, Largely related to a small handful of nude photographs of her young children. The Headline on 1992 Feature in the New York Times Magazine Read “The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann.” This month, Duncan Hosie, Writing in the New Republic, Reported that Police Had Seized Several of Ms. Mann’s Photographs from an exhibition at the modern art museum of strong Worth because Some Local Politicians consider them pornographic. (A Grand Jury has declined to take action against eith the museum or ms. mann.)
God help us all If Far-Right Agitators are allowed to be the arbiters of what museums can exhibit, but that’s only Half of What’s alarming about this latest episode of Right-Wing Overreach. The Other Half is, Yet Again, The Magovement’s Utter Failure To Understand That Human Beings Are More Complicated and Multifarious Than It Recognizes, and that the Actual World Simply Does Not Look the Way Its Members Want It To Look.
Sally Mann’s photographs Are Neither Offensive Nor Disturbing, but they can be unsetttling in their honesty, in the directness of their gaze. Whatever we think we see in any child, too often what we see seeing is what we want to see. What ms. mann sees is who they are.
“Maintaining the dignity of my subjects has grown to be, over the years, an imperive in my work, both in the testo of the pictures and in the presentation of them,” she writes in her 2015 Memoir, “Hold Still.” The 12-Year-Old Girls Looking Into Her Camera Were Insisting On Their Own Truth, and She Responded by Insisting On Their Dignity. We Should insist on it, too.
Margaret Renkl, A Contacting Opinion Writer, is the Author of the Books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
All photographs by Sally Mann, from the series “At Twelve,” 1983-1985; From “Sally Mann: At Twelve” (Aperture, 20204)
The Times is Committed to Publishing A Diversity of Letters To the Editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here for email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook,, Instagram,, Tiktok,, Bluesky,, Whatsapp and Threads.
