Photographer Sally Mann drives with her greyhound, Honey, in the early 2000s. Image: Michael S. Williamson/Courtesy of Michael S. Williamson

Photographer Sally Mann is fascinated by bodies. In the early 1990s, she became famous — or notorious — for her book Immediate Family, which featured photographs of her young children naked. Critics claimed Mann's work eroticized the children, but Mann says the photos were misinterpreted.

"I was surprised by the vehemence, I guess, of the letters and the dead certainty that so many people had that they understood ... my motivations and feelings and who my children were," Mann tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "People feel like they understand the children just by virtue of looking at the pictures but ... those aren't my children. Those are photographs of my children. They're just a tiny, tiny moment slivered out of time, a 30th of a second."

After those photos, Mann moved on to what she describes in her new book, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, as "deeply personal explorations of the landscape of the American South, the nature of mortality (and the mortality of nature), intimate depictions of my husband and the indelible marks that slavery left on the world surrounding me."

Virginia Franklin Carter, pictured here at Mann's graduation from Putney School in 1969, was an important figure in the photographer's life. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

On the way to the Homecoming Dance in 1965. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

Mann's work has included a series of photos of decomposing bodies in a University of Tennessee forensic anthropology research facility and photos of her husband, whose muscles are withering from muscular dystrophy.

Mann is currently working on a series of photos that capture the lingering essence of slavery in the South today. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

Sally Mann describes a photograph as a "tiny moment slivered out of time, a 30th of a second." Image: LIZ LIGUORI/Liz Liguori

Interview Highlights

On photographing her children naked

Mann drinking water off the terrace at Boxerwood Nature Center and Garden as a toddler in 1952. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

It's not that I wanted to do a series of pictures of my children nude, it's just that they were always nude in the summers when I did most of my shooting. We had a cabin on the river on our farm and there's not another breathing soul for probably 5 miles in all directions and they just never seemed to wear clothes. Why should they? They were in the river almost all day and deep into the night, so the fact that in many cases the children were nude ... that's just how the children were. ... I didn't take pictures of them once they reached the age of puberty, certainly. But considerably before then, I think, I quit taking pictures of them.

On what she thinks the photos of her children capture

This photo was included in Mann's photo book Deep South, which was published in 2005. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

This photo was included in Mann's photo book Deep South, which was published in 2005. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

One of the interesting things is to go back and look at the contact sheets and you look at picture after picture after picture of the same scene. And you'll see in one picture, [the children] look mean; and in another one, they're giggling; and in another, one of them is punching the other and they're laughing. They're just doing regular kid things. You just always have to remember that picture ... that's a 30th of a second and to either side of that picture are half a dozen other images that are completely different and warm and friendly and sweet.

On photographing the University of Tennessee's "Body Farm"

The "Body Farm," as it's colloquially known, is designed to help graduate students measure decomposition in human bodies. They use it primarily forensically, I think, so that if law enforcement runs across a body that's, say, been locked up in a trunk for two weeks, they can gauge the size of the maggots or the development of the blowflies and know exactly or close to exactly when that body was put in that trunk given temperature conditions and all that kind of stuff. ...

Mann is currently working on a series of photos that capture the lingering essence of slavery in the South today. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

There was something matter-of-fact about the way those bodies were laid out and how they were treated. I mean, they were a scientific experiment and very quickly I grew to see them that way, in the same way that the graduate students were working with them. So that was one of the shocking things. ... The smell is just unbelievable but I had to sort of pull myself together and figure out a way to handle things I had never seen before and never anticipated ever seeing — these bodies in various stages of decomposition.

Sally Mann reflects on her work, her life and her family history in the book Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. Image: Courtesy of Michael S. Williamson

On her fascination with death

I have had a fascination with death that I think might be considered genetic. ... My father had the same affliction, I guess. The origin of his was the sudden death of his father — this is just a theory, we never talked about it. ... I think it changed the course of his life. He became fascinated with death. He then became a medical doctor and obviously fought death tooth and nail for his patients. But I was surrounded in the household with the iconography of death. He was a very cultured man and he was fascinated with the way death has been portrayed through the ages in all forms, from cave paintings to literature to everything. ... I picked it up by osmosis.

Photographer Sally Mann drives with her greyhound, Honey, in the early 2000s. Image: Michael S. Williamson/Courtesy of Michael S. Williamson

On photography's effect on memory

Using photographs as an instrument of memory is probably a mistake because I think that photographs actually sort of impoverish your memory in certain ways, sort of take away all the other senses — the sense of smell and taste and texture, that kind of stuff.

One of the photos included in Mann's "Battlefield" series, which she began shooting in 2001. Image: Sally Mann/Courtesy of Sally Mann

On photographing her husband's body after his muscular dystrophy diagnosis

I don't think that he in any way in those pictures loses his dignity ... and I don't think anyone would think of him as being weak. ... It was wonderful. It was some of the happiest times I can remember being behind a camera. It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 camera and there's a hood that I put over my head and it's tricky and complicated, but this was just such a lovely moment in our marriage. We're headed into our 45th year of marriage next month. ... It was just such a quiet, peaceful moment for us and it's not that we didn't know he had muscular dystrophy, but it was really one of the first times we actually sat down and looked at what it had done to his body and making art out of it somehow felt like the right thing to do.

You can see more of Mann's work here. Note that some of her photographs are graphic and/or include nudity.

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