It was 1988. My first year as a high school English teacher in a 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 declensions 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 a nine-week camping honeymoon, but he was right about one thing: I was entranced 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 “At Twelve” 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 watching unfold every day in my classroom.
It was partly 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 directed 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 girls were telling her who they were, and she was seeing them. In all their many dimensions, she was seeing them, whatever 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 midst of a profound transition. She may feel herself easing — or galloping — toward sexuality. She may feel an urge, 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 halts and bolts. On Fridays, before class, some of the girls were 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 uniforms, while others wore flouncy dancewear skirts and off-the-shoulder tops. They were long-legged colts pacing back and forth, back and forth, in front of the fence 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 exposes 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 where my family lived the year I was 12, holding a transistor radio up to my ear as Roberta Flack sang “Killing Me Softly With His Song” straight into my brain. I remembered sitting on the edge of the pool in my yellow-checked two-piece, suddenly disinclined to play Marco Polo, for no reason I could give.
Looking back now, I wonder if I thought Ms. Mann’s photographs might hold a clue to the mysteries of that girl with the transistor radio, and to the mysteries of my students, balanced on the hardly registrable cusp between dolls and spandex. Maybe what I was looking for was some kind of explanation, some visual translation of an experience I kept trying fruitlessly to pin down in my writing.
But 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 a 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 the police had seized several of Ms. Mann’s photographs from an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth because some local politicians considered them pornographic. (A grand jury has declined to take action against either 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 MAGA movement’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 unsettling in their honesty, in the directness of their gaze. Whatever we think we see in any child, too often what we’re 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 imperative in my work, both in the taking 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 contributing 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)
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