Living in the South means being both nourished and wounded by the experience. To identify a person as a Southerner is always to suggest not only that her history is inescapable and profoundly formative, but that it is also imperishably present. Southerners live at the nexus between myth and reality where that peculiar amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, loyalty, graciousness and renegade defiance plays out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.  - Sally Mann

We let the remarkable, ordinary wonders of living slip into the oblivion of memory, but they are the very moments Sally Mann lovingly records, resurrects, and returns to us. I would not be surprised if at the moment of our deaths the last thoughts that flicker before our consciousness look like photographs by Sally Mann, and I will be disappointed if mine do not.  - John Wood

For the most part I have not remained on speaking terms with the person I was back in 1979 when these pictures were taken. The past, and most particularly one's own fumbling, painful passage through it, has a way of subverting the work of the present so I am chary about revisiting it. But I welcome the reappearance of this particular moment. It's wreathed in that nimbus glow of golden-hazy early motherhood. Many of these pictures were taken on my living room floor while newborn Emmett napped. Friends would bring casseroles or crib blankets or whatever is brought to new babies, and I would ask them to lie on the floor and let me photograph them.

...Twenty Five years—That's a long time, filled with life's abundance and complexity. Certainly, these were images made in a simpler time, a time of only one serenely napping child, a time as gauzy and fleeting as the mote-speckled sunshaft that fell across his new face.

From the introduction by Sally Mann

(sallymann.com)