‘Always trust your ambivalence,’ urges Sally Mann, on the question of knowing whether your art is good enough to release into the world. Her own tendency for mordant self-scrutiny is one of the unbroken threads in Art Work, an other­wise circuitous, passionate meditation on the artistic life – in particular her own as a photographer. 

Mann, now seventy-four, is best known for her photographic series Immediate Family (1992), in which she captured her pre-teen children in black-and-white, and frequently naked, on the family farm in Virginia. The original exhibition ignited a ‘culture war’ that prefigured today’s near-continuous censorious panics; her first memoir, Hold Still (2015), dealt with the fallout. 

Art Work is a memoir in the guise of a ‘how to’ guide, a series of essays on themes such as luck, rejection, patience, knowing when to self-edit and the perils (and inevitability) of self-censorship. The particulars of Mann’s existence open onto broader reflections on the creative process, its trials and ecstasies. 

For all her self-excoriation, Mann’s prose harbours a confidence, at times a spirited defiance, that evinces another side to her personality. The tone of the book is close to the spoken word: punchy, humorous and digressive, albeit with a range of cultural reference that few conversations could easily sustain. Mann