ART WORK: On the Creative Life, by Sally Mann
“We are all Sally Mann now,” one might think, gazing at the social-media streams that expose so many children. And yet none of us are Sally Mann.
She is the art photographer both renowned and scolded for her “Family Pictures” series, which started in the mid-1980s, showing (sometimes naked) offspring of feral intensity and lasting for a decade as they grew. Her 2015 memoir, “Hold Still,” was more spellbinding than most by full-time writers.
“Art Work,” which promises guidance on the creative life, is pretty much a caboose to that bigger book. The guidance part is a little Julia Cameron, if Julia Cameron still enjoyed a nightly gin and tonic, with a dash of women’s magazine. “How I got it done” is an opening line, echoing a popular feature in The Cut.
Truisms are scattered here like weeds. “It is about how you live your life, because the life you lead is your art and the art you make is your life,” is one. There’s a chapter on killing your darlings, and many sentences that boil down to the old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”
The rest, thankfully, is a garden of Mann: profane, literary, adventuresome. Even though “staying home and enjoying the simple life of a 19th-century Flaubertian recluse,” she avows, “is what I do 99 percent of the time.”
Mann sequesters at a farm near Lexington, Va., the town her late friend and fellow native Cy Twombly called Li’l Chickenswitch. For company there are nine dogs (“every artist needs a dog”) and her longtime husband, Larry Mann, a blacksmith and lawyer by training who she mentions in passing has muscular dystrophy so severe he can hardly walk.
Mr. Mann’s pack rat tendencies have been trying his wife’s compulsive organization since at least 1982, when she exasperatedly sent an inventory, which included several human skulls along with the usual broken appliances, in a letter to a friend (one of many excavated and quoted here, along with rejected photo drafts).
She herself keeps handwritten lists of vocabulary words, budgets, home remedies, journals. “I thought someday I would vanish into deserved insignificance,” she writes, “and all that would be left to show I had lived, like the smear of adipocerous fat at the site of a body’s decomposition, would be those pieces of paper.”
One person’s treasure is another’s trash. Mann writes with astonishment and rue of the perfectly preserved, plastic-filled 1950s trailer she rescued near her property and rented during the pandemic to a couple who turned out to be tinfoil-hatted, AK-47-toting miscreants, who refused to pay rent and destroyed it in spectacular fashion.
She regrets not saving her receipts — the real, paper ones — to better retrace her travels through the South; and the now valuable test prints on the backs of which she used to scrawl angry notes to critics and others. “I can conjure up old slights with an elephantine recall,” she writes of rejection by an odious-sounding gallerist, “while being unable to even faintly discern the outlines of a compliment.”
Now 74 (“close to handing in my dinner pail”) and typing with two arthritic fingers, Mann frets often about the selectivity of memory, its “sanity-imperiling treachery.”
Less painful are her recollections of a first-class trip to Qatar, whose emir hoped to commission her for a portrait (9/11 interfered with scheduling). A believer in “trespass” and transgression, Mann tells of smuggling bottles of airplane liquor to the dry country under a pile of New Yorker magazines, photographing litter in the desert and propping up her feet on the dashboard of her chauffeured Mercedes like a Quentin Tarantino heroine.
Such intermittent glamour notwithstanding, Mann hopes here to demystify the life of the artist, “a profession not unlike being an insurance adjuster or a sportscaster,” she claims. There is plenty about specific film processes, for the photo geeks, but also the trapped fly that ruins, or maybe enhances, the print.
Work-life balance was nonexistent to her; it was all titter-tottered together, and the rough drafts are shown with something like glee. Not the photo of her plucking pinworms from her children’s bums with the rounded edge of a bobby pin — “my squeamish editor has nixed it.” But many shots of a duck’s slaughter, its blood gushing into a bucket, got the green light.
Still, there are a few boundaries Mann will not, or cannot, trespass. Though she finds a metaphor for creativity in hunting for morels with a neighbor whose teenage son has died, she alludes only sidelong in these pages to the suicide of her son, Emmett, who had schizophrenia, at 36. “Art Work” is dedicated to him. (The suicides of her father and mother-in-law, who murdered her father-in-law, were described in the first book.)
Commentators wondered, back in the ’90s, how Mann’s much-photographed children would turn out. Virginia, who as a teen accompanied her on the trip to Qatar and is pictured here shooting her grandfather’s Derringer at age 5, is a lawyer. Jessie is an artist and neuroscientist (“That’s Dr. Mann to you,” her mother writes proudly) who explains the repetition it takes to get good at something, the 10,000 hours touted by Malcolm Gladwell, in molecular terms.
It is a young Jessie, looking like a pre-Code starlet, who appears in one of Mann’s best-known images, “Candy Cigarette,” which, she writes, was “built as carefully as a mason knits together a stone wall.”
It is now one of her most ripped-off, memed and merchandised on Instagram, alongside those millions of other little ones dappled in light and likes.
ART WORK: On the Creative Life | By Sally Mann | Abrams | 272 pp. | $35
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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