Fall 2025 Highlight: Len Prince
Len Prince
American, born 1953
Self Possessed: The Jessie Mann Portfolio
2007
Clothbound clamshell box, 154 photographs
Design by Jim Mahon
Production by Griffin Editions NYC
Between 2002 and 2007, Len Prince and Jessie Mann, the daughter of photographer Sally Mann, embarked on a sustained collaboration that explores performance, authorship, and the fluidity of identity before the camera. Collected in this portfolio of 154 prints, Self Possessed records the evolution of a creative partnership rooted in trust and experimentation.
In the accompanying text, Jessie Mann describes the project as an inquiry into “archetypes and ideal forms,” giving “the archetypal self behind identity a chance to reveal herself.” Across the series, she inhabits a spectrum of personas – the muse, the diva, the Countess de Castiglione, even Andy Warhol – each a symbolic mask through which deeper truths might emerge. Prince’s photographs, precise and theatrical, frame these transformations with a quiet reverence, allowing the performative gesture to stand in for the portrait itself.
Rather than documenting likeness, Self Possessed considers the act of becoming. Mann uses performance to test how selfhood might be constructed, dismantled, and reimagined through the gaze of another. Prince, in turn, photographs not as observer but as collaborator, his disciplined control of light and form balancing the intensity of Mann’s self-invention.Together, they create a visual dialogue that collapses the divide between subject and author. In its scope and intimacy, Self Possessed transforms the portrait into an allegory of seeing—an exploration of how identity is made visible, and how art can momentarily reveal the spirit behind it.
