DESIGN RATIONALE
Sally Mann is best known for her black-and-white photographs, featuring portraiture and landscapes in the southern United States. Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. Mann’s extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children reveal truths that embody the individuality of her own family yet ultimately take on a universal quality. They explore the eternal struggle between the child’s simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy—the holding on and the breaking away. Impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in these astonishing photographs.
I wanted to present her complex and daring work in a way that honored it to its fullest. The best way to do that was by placing it in a very minimalistic setting, which allows the viewer to completely focus on the work. Black background and white text was appropriate instead of its reverse because the images are very intense and dark upon close examination. The Corcoran Gallery, where this show was held, utilized this font family among other design qualities which aided my decisions. The book needed to look clean and professional to match the gallery. The type mainly features this as there are no decorations of any kind in the book, therefore it was skillfully set. Avenir Next is an appropriate, clean sans-serif typeface with multiple weights, which allowed me to use one family for the entire book from the cover to the captions.
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