Sally Mann is chatty and open about nearly any subject imaginable. The photographer easily gets carried off in conversation, finding it hard to resist sharing stories about anything from her friend’s mother who had a lobotomy, to the time the poet Forrest Gander happened to drop by unannounced (the moment turned into a lifelong friendship).
Her disarming trust belies her 74 years on this planet – and brief moment at the centre of a culture wars storm, which we’ll get to later. Via video call from her beloved farm in Lexington, Virginia, she’s gabbing with me as if we are long-lost friends, breezily dropping one-liners and only occasionally invoking an internal censor that tends to arrive a little too late. All this energy services a profound curiosity, an intense work ethic and a meagre capacity for sitting still that has seen her declared one of the most influential photographers working today.
What’s the risk of being honest? Other than ridicule, which I’m used to
Born in Lexington in 1951, Mann was, she has said, a “near-feral” child, the last of three children in a bohemian family, who hardly wore clothes until she was five. Her father, a country doctor, gave her her first camera. At school, she emerged from the darkroom “ecstatic” with the results.
She gradually built a respectable following for her atmospheric photos that drip with the soul of the US south. But in 1992, she was catapulted into the centre of the US’s culture wars when she released her third book of photos, Immediate Family. The book was ostensibly a homage to life with her husband, Larry, and three young children on her beloved farm, and was chock full of beautiful black-and-white images capturing family moments shaded with ethereal transcendence, loving intimacy and bracing intrusiveness.
Seeing the photos in Immediate Family can feel like glimpsing private family events. With a wash of overexposed light, an image such as The Perfect Tomato turns her daughter Jessie into a literal angel ballet-dancing naked on the family picnic table. It could rightfully be called a perfect photograph, but it – and others like it – also pushed a lot of buttons. After the book’s publication, Mann faced a torrent of criticism. She was declared an unfit mother, branded a child pornographer, excoriated in the New York Times, and found herself hunted by a stalker. Though criticism has softened as her work has been reappraised in recent years, it’s still a live issue for Mann – The Perfect Tomato was recently among five photos seized by police at an exhibition of her work at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, after it caught the attention of religious conservatives.
Mann doesn’t shrink from controversy, and doesn’t take kindly to having her artistic expression curtailed. “What’s the risk of being honest,” she asks, “other than ridicule, which I’m used to.” But she also says that she probably wouldn’t release Immediate Family today, because parasocial relationships enabled by the internet have changed the equation.
“My family pictures were an unanticipated risk, in that they made people think that they knew us. A lot of people feel like they know you because you’ve made yourself available. I don’t think the family pictures would have been prudent going out in the world now, because there’s so much access to people. That just gives me the willies – what goes on to the internet and how available people are now.”
But as much as Mann says she doesn’t like the spotlight, her oeuvre does indicate a certain willingness to share. In 2015, she published her memoir, Hold Still, an extremely open book that found her airing all kinds of family history, while sharing personal diaries, letters and photographs. The book dives into the dark heart of racism in the US south and considers her immigrant family’s background of desperate poverty and death. It shocked readers with just how macabre and forthcoming she could be, and also featured startling images of personal vulnerability – we see Mann’s spread legs and pubic hair in a photo she orchestrated to capture the moment her third child emerged during delivery. (Sadly, Mann labels the photo a “dud”.)
The memoir was highly acclaimed, labelled the autobiography of the year, and once again brought the photographer into the spotlight. Though for Mann – who has a master’s degree in creative writing and has described writing and photography as her “twin artistic passions” – the move wasn’t easy. “Switching from being a photographer to writing a book felt a little risky to me,” she says. “I thought I was going to get humiliated. Of course I was thrilled when it was well received, but I did spend five years on it, so I would have been gutted if it hadn’t gotten some attention.”
But she hasn’t left photography behind. Her eerie black-and-white landscapes of the American south have been collected in Deep South (2005) and Southern Landscape (2013), and she documented the effects of her husband Larry’s muscular dystrophy on his body in the intimate 2009 series Proud Flesh. (“The pictures are like one big caress,” she has said.) “I get this little frisson of excitement every time I pick up those cameras and head out to take pictures,” she says. “I like risk. I couldn’t take the same pictures over and over again. If it’s not challenging, it’s probably not good.”
Mann’s print room with work on display; proofs and a dustjacket of her new book, Art Work: On the Creative Life; and a stack of filed prints
Now, 10 years on from her memoir, she is releasing her follow-up piece of writing, Art Work, a book of advice for budding artists. “It’s a how not-to, rather than a how-to,” she says in her deadpan, slightly self-deprecating way. Just like her memoir, this book contains personal stories – many of them humiliating and vulnerable. Talking to her, it’s clear that Mann has been telling these stories for a long time and truly enjoys sharing their every twist and turn. “There were so many stories I thought of after Hold Still,” she said. “This new book seems to be all the stories I tell at dinner parties, stories that just stick around in my head that I think are funny. I made a list of all the things that didn’t get in Hold Still that I wanted to write about. It sort of grew on me after a while.”
Mann agrees that some of the tales in Art Work stray from the book’s ostensible purpose of imparting artistic advice in favour of telling a great yarn. This is particularly evident in the aptly titled chapter Distraction, a twisty story of two ne’er-do-wells armed to the teeth, to whom Mann has the misfortune of renting a refurbished trailer. Before long she’s talking with a bomb squad and watching her beloved trailer get demolished into splinters.
As fascinating as the story is, one might ask what it has to do with making art. But Mann says it has a purpose. “It seemed a bit of a stretch at first, but I thought it was really important for people to know that you can lie fallow for a period while your mind processes. The whole time I was dealing with that trailer, I was just furious about it. That incident didn’t immediately redound to good art, but it gave me some sense of perspective. It made me want to get back to my art. Maybe that’s the point of enforced fallowness, that you really want to get back to work. When you get to the point that it’s harder not to work than to work.”
The stories in Art Work frequently sound a little too good to be true. Here’s another: as a cocky young twentysomething in the early 1970s, Mann becomes taken with a man on a plane wearing a pocket square and unceremoniously seats herself beside him. (This was back when air passengers could just saunter up to any empty seat.) After chatting with him, she learns that he is a wealthy astrophysicist named Ron. By the time they land, this stranger is giving Mann the key to his mansion smack in the middle of Manhattan’s choicest real estate. Ron, it turns out, is Ronald Winston, son of the late jewellery magnate Harry Winston.
Wouldn’t we all be so lucky? Reading Art Work, you might be excused for thinking that Mann has lived a charmed life – one moment she’s getting the key to Ronald Winston’s home, the next the emir of Qatar is positively begging her to take his money in exchange for a portrait.
But for whatever dumb luck she has managed to fall into, she has shown an equally intense amount of grit. From her teenage years, she was hustling for every photographic opportunity she could get. Living in the middle of nowhere, the self-taught photographer had to work hard to make her mark. In fact, Mann has folders and folders full of rejection letters on her computer hard drive, which she charmingly shares in Art Work.
Always have another body of work waiting in the wings that you’re equally excited about
Today, Mann still lives on her farm, and spends her days tending her 45 acres of land while keeping up with her art. “I spend enormous amounts of time running a weed eater [strimmer], or taking my chainsaw and cutting trees off my trails,” she says, detailing the impressive work she undertakes in between the equally intense work of shooting and printing photos. “I’m a worker, I’m a peasant, I’m really strong, I can do almost anything.” She’s currently working on two new photography projects: one is digital, a medium she’s never fully explored before, and which represents a huge artistic departure given that she’s known for not only making her own darkroom prints but also for using challenging large-format cameras. The other project uses an archaic form of film rarely employed these days.
Surprisingly, Mann tells me that her favourite piece of advice for younger artists didn’t make it into the book. “I get asked ‘What would you say to artists?’ a lot. If I could say one thing, it’s to always have another body of work waiting in the wings that you’re equally excited about,” she says. “It’s so easy to get discouraged when you finish a body of work, you think you’ll never do anything as good. I always think that I have nothing left, and then I go out and find something.”
It’s this restlessness that probably has her continuing to fret over Art Work. “Just the other day I thought of four things I wanted to add to this book,” she says. “I ran them by my editor and he said: ‘Sally, the book is shipping today. It’s already printed. It’s done.’”
At the end of our time together, Mann seems downright disappointed. As I wrap up by asking if there’s anything else she wants to say, explaining that it’s common practice to do so, because people are usually holding back on something, she promptly declares: “I never hold anything back.” She’s probably very right about that.
Art Work: On the Creative Life by Sally Mann is published by Particular Books on 18 September (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply