Art Work: On the Creative Life

“A big and beautiful gift-worthy holiday art book” (New York Times), this new bookby artist Sally Mann about the challenges and transcendent pleasures of the creative process, is now a New York Times bestseller.

“Erudite, frank, and funny.” ―Amor Towles, bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway

Offering a spellbinding mix of wild and illuminating stories, practical (and some impractical) advice, and life lessons, Art Work, by photographer and writer Sally Mann, is not to be missed.

Written in the same direct, fearless, and occasionally outrageous tone of her bestselling memoir, Hold Still, this new book reaffirms Mann as a unique and resonant voice for our times and is destined to become a classic.

Illustrated throughout with photographs, journal entries, and letters that bring immediacy and poignancy to the narrative, Art Work is full of thought-provoking insights about the hazards of early promise; the unpredictable role of luck; the value of work, work, work, and more hard work; the challenges of rejection and distraction; the importance of risk-taking; and the rewards of knowing why and when you say yes.

In sparkling prose and thoughtfully juxtaposed visuals and ephemera, Art Work is a generous, provocative, and compulsively readable exploration of creativity by one of our most original thinkers.

Sally Mann is a Guggenheim Fellow and three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time in 2001. In 2021, she received the Prix Pictet and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary. Mann’s Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Little, Brown, 2015) received universal critical acclaim, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Mann is based in Lexington, Virginia.