Family, Landscape, and Race in Sally Mann’s Photographs

“How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality?” asks the photographer Sally Mann in her memoir Hold Still. “Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.” Mann’s slightly exasperated remarks suggest the irony in Immediate Family, the title of the book that made her famous — and for some, infamous — more than a quarter-century ago.