On a broiling June day in western Virginia, Sally Mann told me how she brought her dead dog back to life.
“He died on the trail,” she explained. She knew that Comfit, one of her Belgian Malinois, had breathing issues, but not fatal ones. “I picked him up and carried him to the riverbank, slid him down the riverbank into the water, hauled him into a little spit of land, and I just started beating him. And that’s when he took a breath.”
She shook her head in astonishment, smiling. Her steel-wool-colored ponytail bounced as she climbed the hill that encircles her house. “His tongue had gone pitch black. If I had been a real photographer, I would have shot that tongue all covered in sand.”
Mann has an old-world bluntness about mortality. It is why her photographs command: Her portraits of human corpses and Civil War fields, close-ups of her husband’s advancing muscular dystrophy, the intimations of adulthood in the faces of her young models.
It is also why we read her. A writer of prodigious talent and commitment to the mot juste, Mann, 74, is now publishing her second memoir, “Art Work: On the Creative Life,” a front-porch chatty reminiscence for artists and writers seeking their footing, by “an old woman,” Mann writes, “close to handing in my dinner pail.” (Never mind that she rows every morning and kept a lead on me, her junior by two generations, as we roamed some of her 750 acres, which are crisscrossed by trails that she clears with her farmhand, Elvis. Nerves run through her like a ground current.)
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