Art Work: On the Creative Life

This winsome memoir from photographer Mann (Remembered Light) offers practical guidance for artists. Peppered with anecdotes from a lifetime of professional wins and losses, Mann’s advice is both conventional (“If it were easy, everyone would be doing it”) and unexpected (“I pragmatically decided that insecurity... could be my friend”). Excerpts from journals and letters shed light on life events and preoccupations that inspired Mann’s work, and dispel the myth that “when [real artists are] not making art, they are drinking absinthe with friends and vacationing on St. Barts.” Elsewhere, Mann shares “failed pictures” from her photographic memoir, Hold Still, to counter assumptions that “you get better as you go, not repeating the mistakes of the past,” and plunges into thorny questions of selling out, recalling a time she accepted a free trip to Qatar to take the emir’s portrait but refused further payment (“Artistic true north is variable”). Similarly delicate balances—between light and shadow in photos, humility and chutzpah in life—provide the account with a running theme. Throughout, Mann is a clear-eyed, self-deprecating guide, framing her many mistakes as part of a lifelong creative practice. In the process, she reminds readers that there’s nothing static about still photography. This entertains as much as it enlightens. Photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)