Photographs seem to represent, for Mann, a counter-reality, an opposition to what is and what was. The dangers in them represent not the real dangers at hand, but dangers that might have been or could be. Meanwhile, some of the real dangers are erased, written over. So are the memories. When she tries to recall her beloved father, Robert Munger, she recalls only photographs she’s seen. “Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely.” Conversely, her friend and neighbor, the artist Cy Twombly, who was rarely photographed, is all there: “His drawling voice, his wrinkled face, the gap between the front teeth.”

Mann says her first good family photograph was Damaged Child, in which her daughter Jessie looks like she’s been beaten up. In fact, Jessie’s face was swollen with bug bites. Mann chose that title to bring out the brutal resonance with Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photograph of a poor girl in rags in Shacktown, Oklahoma. She pinpoints what appealed to her in the image she caught of her own child:

As strange as it sounds, I found something comforting about this disturbing picture. Looking at the still-damp contact print, and then looking at Jessie, completely recovered and twirling around the house in her pink tutu, I realized the image inoculated me to a possible reality that I might not henceforth have to suffer. Maybe this could be an escape from the manifold terrors of child rearing, an apotropaic protection; stare them straight in the face but at a remove—on paper, in a photograph.

For that reason, Mann likes to photograph “disease and accidents of every kind.” She magnifies her children’s cases of “common impetigo into leprosy, skin wrinkles into whip marks, simple bruises into hemorrhagic fever.” She deliberately makes things look worse than they are. And “when a scary situation turned out benign,” she writes, “I replayed it for the camera with the worst possible outcome.”

Once, when Jessie went missing near a creek, Mann began a frantic search. Her daughter was soon found, but Mann could not shake her fear. “The next day I set up the camera [and] cajoled seven-year-old Emmett into putting on a dress.” Then she made him play dead in some leaves. It is this kind of gothic sensibility, this intrepid wish to stare down horror in order to prevent it, that produces photographs in which sticky Popsicle juice running down a naked body can look like blood, in which a ring of pee surrounding a little girl on a mattress can look like the remains of a violation, and in which sleep can look like death.

Mann is amazed when people do not get the distinction between photographs—“figures on silvery paper, slivered out of time”—and reality. In this, Mann seems unexpectedly Victorian. In her photographs, capturing reality is not typically the aim; her children play roles, much as little girls played beggars, dreamers, and fairy-tale characters for Lewis Carroll’s camera. Indeed, some of Mann’s pictures of her children echo Carroll’s photographs of his child subjects. Think of Alice Liddell (the model for Alice in Wonderland) dressed in beggar’s rags and holding out a cupped hand, one eyebrow raised, her dress falling off her shoulders. Her expression is both appealing and knowing. She was clearly in on the game, and the game, apparently, was grand. Another of Carroll’s child subjects, Dymphna Ellis, once described the excitement of Carroll’s photo-play: “I remember the mess and the mystery … We cried when he went away … We were absolutely fearless with him. We felt he was one of us, and on our side against all the grown-ups.”

Kim Rushing

Far from being helpless subjects, Mann’s children seem willing accomplices, and sometimes willful, defiant ones. They know the kind of pictures their mother likes to take and have often pointed out photographic opportunities to her. They know the difference between pictures and reality. They’ve also had the privilege of editing out photographs they don’t like. Before Immediate Family was published, for instance, Emmett got rid of a nude photograph of himself with socks on his hands, not because he was nude but because he thought he looked like a dork.