Sally Mann is a serious, thoughtful and sophisticated American photographer whose work has raised controversy since her 1984 portraits of her three children aged under 10. This significant retrospective reintroduces their gorgeously vital dancing, swimming, dressing-up games and unembarrassed nakedness at their Virginia farm, and closes with recent portrayals of them as young women.

Arguments still rage around Mann’s work, but mostly she is now rightly saluted for defying those who only see sexual exploitation in photographs of children’s naturalness; she has never denied the complexities involved. Her portrait of the 10-year old blonde daughter mimicking an adult smoking a (sweet) Candy cigarette has Lolita connotations but is also universal and typical of how girls play and pose. More disturbing to me is the startlingly poetic image of the youngest girl floating face up in water, an image resembling a Victorian momento mori.

Death has infiltrated Mann’s work since her early portraits. She followed them into the woods surrounding her home, and gave them an ethereal, melancholy beauty which matches their connections with the Civil War. With What Remains (2001), she entered an actual arena of death, an enclosure where anonymous corpses lie on the grass in a university experiment on decomposition. Literally breath-taking, some are also surprisingly lyrical, while others — including the open-jawed woman whose skull still carries flyaway grey hair — are difficult to watch.

Mann’s use of an early plate camera with slow exposures enables her to create an often timeless quality. Faces, 2004 — a series of extreme close-ups of her children — possess a 19th-century, death-like beauty exaggerated by their closed or unseeing eyes. This loop connecting her children and Mann’s continuous preoccupation with death make this magnificent collection a vital interpretation of two universal themes.
Until September 19. Information: 0845 262 1618, photonet.org.uk