This is a place, Rockbridge County, that she depicts as both idyllic and self-deceiving from the get-go: Most of them are tied to the place in which she took them: a large farm her family owns near the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia. In fact one feels bad about lingering so long and with such interest on the controversy, because Mann has many other things to tell us. The age of ubiquitous self-disclosure, wrought by the internet, throws into sharp relief the fact that these pictures are, at the very least, clearly art. When presented this way, through Mann’s seductive, cerebral, yet preternaturally calm written voice, the controversy seems shouted across a long void of history, though it wasn’t so very long ago. Some are archival, from Mann’s family, but others show the evolution of her art, including some of those images of the children. The book insists on putting those images and that life in context, almost literally: though this is not a heavy, coffee-table art book, its text is laced with photographs. Now writing some 23 years later, the Mann of Hold Still presents another side of the artist entirely.

“How can a sentient person of the modern age,” she complains of one relatively lettered critic, the writer Anne Bernays, “mistake photography for reality?” Mann seems to know that these people are mostly misled, but she saves her vitriol for those she feels should have known better. One person at least harassed them for years.

The people who always come running when there is a stoning afoot turned up. As refracted by all of her bad press, actually, Mann became a figure of a favourite kind of modern controversy: a bad mother, one apparently willing to sacrifice the psychological wellbeing of her children on the altar of art (or, as many thought they had diagnosed it, selfishness). Presented through the lens of a dubious outsider, Mann came off as alternately imperious and oblivious to the potential objections some might have to her presentation of her children in the nude. They gleaned wider attention than art photographs typically got in the early 1990s, when Mann was the subject of a lot of bad press, and specifically a profile in the New York Times magazine that saw a journalist (now arts critic Richard Woodward) lift her life and work almost wholly from its context. The photographs don’t stand alone they come with a tailwind of controversy. T he visual force of Sally Mann’s photographs of her three children – the collection called Immediate Family – is such that every article about her, even this review of her new memoir Hold Still, must begin with some mention of them.

Hold Still by Sally Mann