Ten years ago, when Sally Mann published Hold Still , her moving and startlingly frank best-selling memoir, she brought readers into close contact with her husband and children, and with the rural corner of Virginia that had indelibly shaped their lives and her work as an artist and photographer.

In her new book, Art Work: On the Creative Life (Abrams) , she takes us much deeper into that work, with its strange juxtapositions of intellectual rigor and luck. She gets right down to it in the first sentence: “This is a book about how to get shit done.”

A page from Sally Mann’s notebook, circa 1973 © Sally Mann, courtesy of Abrams.

Earlier this month, she talked with me (over Zoom) from her Lexington, Virginia, farm...

Dodie Kazanjian: You write about editorial rigor in the book

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