Photographer Sally Mann warns of 'new era of culture wars' after art seizure

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The winding road that leads to Sally Mann's home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is dotted with lush green fields, where horses graze and gallop when visitors turn a corner.

There's a mythical feel to this place, her own "local," which she's called Three Graces. They of Greek mythology, muses to artists since time eternal who also lend their name to a print that the American photographer has yet to show in the United States.

"A guaranteed gut-flutterer but illegal as hell" — if it were deemed child pornography — is how Mann writes about the 1995 photo in her second memoir, Art Work, out this month. It's a follow-up to her first, Hold Still.

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Emulating traditional representations of the goddesses, Mann and her youngest daughter, Virginia, face forward while the eldest, Jessie, turns toward the ocean. They hold hands and appear graceful and elated as they urinate. Mann calls herself a "chicken" for not including the image in the book. "I'm risk-averse fundamentally. And more so now," she said during a recent conversation at her studio.

That's because Mann, whose work is held at major art institutions around the world, is reeling after police seized four of her most celebrated — and reviled — photographs off the walls of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas in January. "Awful" and "shocking," she recalled.

toggle caption Sally Mann

toggle caption Sally Mann

In one, a toddler Virginia is asleep, sprawled across a bed she wetted. A popsicle drips on son Emmett's lower body, genitals included, in another. It's a tribute to early 20th century photographer Edward Weston's "Torso of Neil" (1925), of his own son. Both similarly evoke a marble sculpture, in "marmoreal" fashion to borrow one of Mann's favorite terms — she keeps a list handy — but Weston's is cropped above the sensitive bits.

The black-and-white im