Böcker av Sally Mann

Art Work, by photographer and writer Sally Mann, offers a spellbinding mix of wild and illuminating stories, practical (and some impractical) advice, and life lessons for artists and writers-or anyone interested in the creative path. Written in the same frank, fearless, and occasionally outrageous tone of her bestselling memoir, Hold Still, this new book reaffirms Mann as a unique and resonant voice for our times and is destined to become a classic.Illustrated throughout with photographs, journal entries, and letters that bring immediacy and poignancy to the narrative, Art Work is full of thought-provoking insights about the hazards of early promise; the unpredictable role of luck; the value of work, work, work, and more hard work; the challenges of rejection and distraction; the importance of risk-taking;and the rewards of knowing why and when you say yes. In sparkling prose and thoughtfully juxtaposed visuals and ephemera, Art Work is a generous, provocative, and compulsively readable exploration of creativity by one of our most original thinkers.

Where does the impulse to create come from? What are the forces that shape an artist's work? This ground-breaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, charts the making of one of America's greatest artists. As Sally Mann tells her story, her work's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South is revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her.Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder."In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own experience. This is the record of an artist's life, and a meditation on place, people, family, and the nature of creativity itself.

To mark the book's thirtieth anniversary, Aperture is reoriginating the groundbreaking classic At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women in a masterful facsimile edition. At Twelve is Sally Mann's revealing, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls on the verge of adulthood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction, "These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose-what adults make of that pose may be the issue." The young women in Mann's unflinching, large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer's gaze with a disturbing equanimity.