Reader note: linked photographic collections include childhood nudity and other sensitive imagery. This article discusses allegations about the work without reproducing the disputed photographs.
Before considering the police investigation, spend a moment with the museum’s account of The New Mothers (1989). Two of Sally Mann’s daughters stand barefoot with dolls, trying on the gestures of adult life. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth describes the picture as both playful and uneasy. Children imitate their elders; a photograph leaves us wondering how much of the adult world they already understand. See the work and its museum interpretation.
This was part of a much wider conversation in Diaries of Home. The exhibition brought together photographic and moving-image approaches to family, belonging, and domestic life. Its curators treated home as a place that can hold safety and conflict together. That context offers a way to approach Mann’s photographs as questions about childhood and representation, before deciding what to make of them. Explore the exhibition and its other artists.
In January 2025, Fort Worth police seized four Mann photographs from the exhibition. Contemporary local reporting describes criticism in The Dallas Express, objections from elected officials including Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, and support for the investigation from Concerned Christian Citizens. The objections framed the photographs as exploitation of children. These were accusations, not established findings about the works. Read the January reporting.
The Danbury Institute’s own campaign page says it gathered signatures demanding removal and credits public pressure for the seizure. That is evidence of a group openly seeking to remove work from view. Its claim to have caused the outcome still needs to be distinguished from a documented account of how police made their decision. The page also retains an outdated description of an ongoing investigation. Read the group’s account.
The outcome was different from that description: a grand jury declined to take action, the police case closed in March, and the photographs were returned in April. They nevertheless missed the remainder of the exhibition. Returning an object cannot restore the particular encounter a visitor might have had with it during that show. FIRE’s April update, NPR’s later reporting.
The people inside the photographs also deserve a voice. In a 2001 Aperture interview, Jessie Mann described enjoying the photographic collaboration and valuing the pictures, while explaining how controversy complicated family relationships and growing up. She recalled being consulted about publication and said she would still have agreed, but also acknowledged how little the children could have anticipated. This is her account at eighteen, not a statement of all the siblings’ views today. Read Jessie Mann in her own words.
There is a further, quieter consequence. Speaking to NPR in September 2025, Sally Mann identified a particular photograph, Three Graces, that she had omitted from her new book, and described increased aversion to risk after the seizure. That gives us a named decision to investigate, beyond a general claim that artists must be frightened. It remains the artist’s explanation of her decision. Read the interview.
A reader should be able to appreciate a photograph, question the photographer’s choices, listen to its subject, and oppose its suppression, all at once.
To explore: Start with the museum’s Mann page, then read Jessie’s interview. Together they offer an encounter with both the art and someone whose life became part of it. The New Mothers is an introduction to Mann’s work here; this article does not identify it as one of the seized photographs.
A question to carry away: What would it mean to take a subject’s complicated feelings seriously without asking those feelings to settle every argument about whether others may see the work?
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