LEXINGTON, Va. — “It’s just indescribable,” Sally Mann, the photographer and writer, was saying. She stood in the kitchen of the home she built on her family’s farm with Larry Mann, her husband of 46 years, and erupted in tears.

“I’m just trying to keep moving,” she said.

On the large dining table were her haunting, evocative photographs taken over the years of the studio in downtown Lexington where her friend, the painter Cy Twombly, had worked. Twombly was born 23 years before Ms. Mann in this same small town in Virginia. In her intimate and elegiac images, some with just the play of light on the wall and floor of the emptied studio, after his death in 2011, it was hard not to feel an acute absence — not of one man but two.

In June, while preparing an exhibition of these photos, Ms. Mann suffered a sudden and most devastating loss. Emmett, her eldest child, who had struggled with schizophrenia in adulthood, took his own life, at the age of 36.

Now the Twombly catalog she is gazing at, and the show, called “Remembered Light,” opening on Sept. 22 at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, are “suffused with grief,” she said.