On a broiling June day in western Virginia, Sally Mann told me how she brought her dead dog back to life.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe died on the trail,\u201d she explained. She knew that Comfit, one of her Belgian Malinois, had breathing issues, but not fatal ones. \u201cI 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\u2019s when he took a breath.\u201d<\/p>\n
She shook her head in astonishment, smiling. Her steel-wool-colored ponytail bounced as she climbed the hill that encircles her house. \u201cHis tongue had gone pitch black. If I had been a real photographer, I would have shot that tongue all covered in sand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mann has an old-world bluntness about mortality. It is why her photographs command: Her portraits of human corpses<\/a> and Civil War fields<\/a>, close-ups<\/a> of her husband\u2019s advancing muscular dystrophy, the intimations of adulthood in the faces of her young models.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cArt Work: On the Creative Life,\u201d<\/a> a front-porch chatty reminiscence for artists and writers seeking their footing, by \u201can old woman,\u201d Mann writes, \u201cclose to handing in my dinner pail.\u201d (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.)<\/p>\n Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into<\/a>\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe<\/a>\u00a0for all of The Times.<\/p>\n Thank you for your patience while we verify access.<\/p>\n Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in<\/a>.<\/p>\n