"These are photographs of my children... Many of these images are intimate, some are fictional, and some are fantastical, but most are ordinary things every mother has seen. I take photographs when they are bloodied, sick, naked, or angry. They dress up, pout and pose, wear body paint, wade like otters in the dark river." Sally Mann, from the Introduction
 
Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland home in Virginia, Sally Mann's extraordinary and intimate photographs of her children, Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, reveal truths that embody the individuality of her immediate family and ultimately take on a universal quality. Mann states that her work is "about everyone's memories, as well as their fears," a theme echoed by Reynolds Price in her eloquent and moving reflective essay that accompanies the photographs in Immediate Family.
With sublime dignity, sharp wit, and savage grace, Mann's images explore the eternal struggle for autonomy: clinging and breaking away. This is the stuff of Greek drama: impatience, terror, self-discovery, doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in Sally Mann's astonishing photographs.
 
A traveling exhibition of Immediate Family, organized by Aperture, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in the fall of 1992.