Seven lessons on the creative life

How do you make something worth looking at? How do you hone a technical skill that allows you to make a physical object that is, at least partly, what you saw in your imagination? And how do you continue to do this day-in, day-out while the bills pile up on the table, the children shout for your attention, the dog needs to go to the vets and everybody needs to eat?

Sally Mann, now 74, has been living these questions, or variations of them, since she was 19. At 19 she decided she would marry Larry Mann and she would become a photographer. She has now been married for 55 years and her large format black-and-white prints have been shown across the world, attracting both praise and controversy. She is also a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the International Photography Hall of Fame and was named ‘America’s best photographer’ by Time magazine in 2001.

Her latest book Art Work: On The Creative Life uses memory and extracts from letters and diaries to show how she made art, a career and a life. But Mann has also reached the age where she feels okay about passing on some wisdom and Art Work is, as she puts it, “a book about how to get shit done”. It is funny, revealing and, for those of us engaged in any kind of creative practice, a well-intentioned shove. Here are just seven of the many lessons you will find throughout.

1. There is luck, of sorts

Luck can be simply about when and where you are born, says Mann. Or there’s the manufactured luck of choosing to go to an art school in a major city and make connections. Sometimes there are even moments of “pure palm-to-forehead” fortune. But not often. “There is a time in most lives, and it varies in duration, when you expect the world will shower upon you the lucky blessings to which you have a perfect right,” says Mann. “The sooner the day comes when you realise this is not how it’s going to go, the better off you’ll be.”

2. Many things can hold you back and one of them is you

“The ‘debris that holds me back’ has taken many forms, as I’m sure it has in every artist’s life. It can be our day jobs, our poverty, our wastrel siblings, our shithole apartment, the rotgut wine we drink too much of, the broke-down, half-assed car, our lying son-of-a-bitch former best friend… but we would never admit that what actually holds us back is that we just pain waste half of our life not making art but doing dumb things too embarrassing to repeat.” 

3. Adapt your work to your life

Mann raised three children, but was determined to continue making pictures whilst they were small. “I had a playpen and a bassinet set up in the darkroom and don’t give me grief about my inadequate air-handling system”, she says. She asked friends to come to her house to model and, when no friends were available, took pictures of her children instead. This practical move, photographing her children as they posed and played and ran wild, would result in some of her best-known work and collected in the photobook Immediate Family. 

4. On distraction…

“It is hard for me to imagine Tolstoy cleaning out the chicken coop and yet I know he must have had those kinds of quotidian distractions and obligations,” says Mann. “Luckily for him, he didn’t have to refresh the New York Times app to be given the gruesome geopolitical news, or obsessively maintain his social media presence, like just about everybody does now.” Chores and appointments and forgotten shopping items are all distractions. Is it possible, asks Mann, that this is what life actually is? That these distractions, this holding-it-together, “might actually refresh and enrich the creative mind in some inexplicable and necessary way?” 

5. Learn your craft, but allow for brilliance

Sally Mann is quite happy to laugh at the pictures she took as a very young woman and the pompous terms she described them with. But she does see them as part of a process, a striving after technique in its many forms. She has spent hours with cameras and lenses and learning new darkroom processes. For her, art, creation, is more than just vision. “Learn your craft,” she says. “You learn it like we learned typing or baking a soufflé or driving a back-hoe. It’s not everything, of course. The poet Charles Wright summed it up this way: “Pure technique is the spider’s web without the spider - it glitters and catches but doesn’t kill”. Your technique will be invisible if your art is good enough, if it kills. If it doesn’t, if it’s all glitter, technique is all you’ll see.” 

6. We have a responsibility to the world

“I know you’re a creative soul and - like me - your tolerance for, say, three-hour committee meetings is probably pretty low, but the situation is dire and if not us, who? Activism is not antithetical to the practice of your art… Ethical and existential issues, moral right and wrong, global turmoil in myriad forms, all operate on a scale of values that is not entirely dissimilar from those you may encounter in your creative life, despite the general misconception that art occupies some rarified element.”

7. A final word…

“Embrace without irony the concepts of beauty, hope, joy, honesty and, always, affection. Leave your fearless trace, dove sta memoria, because beauty matters. As an artist, you are a sensitive filament picking up unique frequencies and making the work they evoke. And, if you are lucky, when that work is released, it will find untingled nerve endings out there in the world and lustily tingle them, manifesting indelible truths in which someone will one day find beauty. That is our job.”