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. Renklaj-christmaspg, 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.

Image

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,66jogo casino 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.

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In the dwindling days of a spectacularly dreadful season, many White Sox fans are averting their eyes. On Sunday, the team lost for the 120th time this year, tying the major league record for most losses by a modern-day team in a single season.

Mr. Boileau was arrested on Friday and released on $30,000 bond on Saturday, his attorney, Jimmie Sparrow, said.

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