>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: sally mann is one of america's preeminent photographers. for three decades, she has captured images that are haunting and romantic all at once. her 1992 series made her famous and created 10 years it featured her children at home on their virginia farm. these photos deemed a great work of art outrage some for their composition and nudity. sally writes about that moment as well as her life and work in a new book called "hold still: a memoir with photographs." i spoke with sally mann for a

candid conversation in new york city. so, what brought you to say rather than taking pictures, i am going to write about the taking of pictures and my own life? sally: well, what brought me there was the -- i was invited to deliver the lecture at harvard. i thought it was mistake. i thought it had been mis address, the envlelope. anyway, they are three lectures an hour each. they are scholarly, academic lectures. and took me a year to say yes. and it was three years down the road. i had plenty of time to think about it. charlie: this is a culmination of a life in photography. sally: it is but it turned, out to be more than that because when i went, when i set out to

right those lectures i went so far back in time and began to study the whole genetic thread that brought me there. and but -- up to the attic and dug out the old boxes. yeah, yeah the pictures and the letters and the dried boutonnieres and the ship's manifest. charlie: you seem in your work always to be interested in life and death and memory and history and place. sally: yeah. that may be because i am a southerner. you know about that. charlie: i do. we like to tells stories. and you do it with the camera. i do it with voice. sally: yeah. charlie: when did this love affair with photography begin? sally: pretty early, really.

17. charlie: did your dad give you your first camera? sally: he did. he had a light that he had taken around the world in 1939. -- a lyca. 1937. and he handed it to me with virtually no explanation, no this is how you load the film. you remember all that stuff. i started taking pictures, and it was an instant love affair. charlie: what was it? sally: what was it? ecstatic. the joy of looking at a negative. the fixer's dripping down your arms. it's still magic. charlie: it is that more than taking the picture. sally: maybe, because you take a picture and you so fervently pray you have got the 10th of the second you thought you got. and so many times you do not.

you get the 10th of the second either side of the one you hope you got. really it is when you see the negative that the moment happens. and there is nothing like that moment. i have said other times. it is almost sexual in its intensity. you are just excstatic. charlie: do you see it? instantly sally: yeah. even a negative form, which is reversed you can tell right away, because it had a got -- has got the proportions and the right field -- feel to it. charlie: and you like black and white? sally: i do. charlie: why? sally: it's harder. that is not why i like it. but it also makes you get right to the essence of what you're taking the picture of. you are not distracted by the color. color is just an entirely different process, way of thinking. charlie: but the interesting

thing is to live on a farm, which is full of color. green grass, blue skies and forest and everything. sally: it's funny. the way my mind works, i see everything in black and white. i now start seeing things, i see you in an 8x10 rectangle. charlie: god help me. sally: you start blocking out things. that is important part of taking pictures is the ability to isolate what you're concentrating on. sometimes when i'm reading a book, i have this -- and i do not know if everyone does this -- it will describe the scene and i will see the scene in my mind as an eidetic vision but i will see it as a black and white photograph. complete with burning and dodging. the sky should be darker. there you are in wayne faulkner and clinton is about to throw himself off the bridge. the river should be dark but the

trees -- i think visually all the time. charlie: back to putney. sally: oh, gosh. ok. charlie: somebody once said the reason she likes photography is you like the dark room because that is the place you and her boyfriend could get together. sally: yeah. get together, a euphemism. there wa ths that. no question about that. charlie: you took your first intimate photographs there. sally: i did. and of course, got in trouble for it. i got in trouble for everything at putney. i was a bad girl. but the picture got me in trouble. i was a, for once, i was innocent. it was a completely innocent picture. but it's nudity. charlie: we will talk more about that. sally: maybe not too much about that. charlie: because this is -- of life. and there are so many things

that can people those pictures as part of who you are as a photographer and having to do with family, and it has to do with landscapes and past history. but you wanted to go back to where you came from. you wanted to go back to virginia. sally: i never left virginia. for the briefest time. the whole time iw was miserable. pretty much. i missed the embrace of the mountains and the kindness of the people. yeah, the whole sweetness of the land. vermont just did not do it for me. sally:charlie: the older i get, the more i appreciate kindness. sally: isn't it funny that the south that is so known for so many unkind acts -- violence and prejudice, can have within its boundaries just the sweetest kindest people? most generous. sally: you get a job at washington -- charlie: you get a job at

washington in the. sally: briefly. charlie: was it the lewis house? sally: it was the law school. i photographed that. charlie: the did an exhibition. sally: you have done your homework. charlie: but it is you, it is your life. these photographs it on top of a life. sally: a big pile of them. charlie: especially your life. family is central. you go back to a place where your father was a general practitioner. your mother ran a book store. sally: mm-hmm. he can't ride. charlie: but immediate family. 1990? thereabouts. sally: the book came out in

1992. i started the pictures and maybe, i said, 1984. it is probably closer to 985. charlie: how do you measure getting better? sally: i think it is sort of a visceral thing. charlie: you can see the difference in sally mann cercirca 2015 and sally mann circa 2000 15 years? sally: yeah, yeah. um again, i don't know that it's an intellectual process. although i may ask myself intellectual questions. i think the differences that i used to be taking pictures to save things. the impulse was to either take pictures to save some thing or two try and see -- to try and see what something would look like when it was photographed. now it's a lot more important to

me to actually say something, as opposed to save something. i'm working from an intellectual construct, and i'm trying to make, trying to use the photographs in service to a concept, which i did not start out that way. i did not start the family pictures to talk. they were just sort of -- i was taking pictures since the kids were around and gradually construct was built around that. charlie: that is what immediate family was about. sally: they were documentary in origin. they have -- they grew less so. they grew to have a narrative around them. an aesthetic, and an intellectual narrative. and a metaphorical implication. they got much more cup located. -- complicated. charlie: did you know what you were doing? sally: no. i think i had begun to make a commitment to the -- using the commonplace to somehow

make images that were resonant and revelatory in a universally i don't know anesthetic and lyrical way. what could be more commonplace in children, rug rats? charlie: your own children at a cabin. sally: yeah. i worked the 12 year olds before that. i was becoming more -- charlie: they were 10 at the time. sally: the 12-year-olds were 12. the kids were not even born then. they were infants. charlie: when he took the photographs, they were under 10. sally: when i started the photographs, virginia was a newborn. charlie: what we are telling us? because on the one hand, it is all of the themes of what it means to be young, playing, jumping in the water. on the other hand, people read

into it seems of loneliness quiet sexuality. sally: people read unbelievable things into it. that is what was so shocking to me. i knew they were not without undertones. i knew they were not simple snapshots. but some of the ways they were interpreted were shocking to me. charlie: you knew there would be controversy. sally: i didn't. but i found out soon enough. i say was i was blind-sided and i was -- charlie: by all the things people said, they accused you because you are photographing naked children. on the other hand, people consider them beautiful and brilliant and it marked you as a photographer. people set a great photographer has just appeared. that was the beginning of sally mann's public reputation.

sally: that is true. charlie: i'm amazed the things you did -- you clearly were colleges of making sure you had them talk to psychologists. you were concerned about not sho wing photographs they did not like. you showed -- sally: i gave them editorial control. in as much as a child can have editorial. concern, and that is the question editorial discernment. and that's the concern so many people had, was how could they know? but they did. they were visually sophisticated kids. we talked about the pictures. charlie: what was the conversation? sally: well you know, do you like this? what do you think this picture says? does this picture say something about you are -- you are not comfortable with? charlie: what did your husband say? sally: the same. charlie: this is a close family.

sally: pretty close. charlie: this is a family that has no secrets between them. sally: i would imagine there are a few secrets, but we are close family even now. or especially now maybe. charlie: now they are all successful adults. how do they see these photographs? sally: i usually answer that by saying you should ask them. i mean they are all in their 30's. in fact, virginia is right over there. i suggest you consult here. i think that they're they're proud of them. i remember -- virginia wanted to give immediate family to her math teacher for christmas. even then, yeah. yeah. charlie: so they understood or they appreciated. sally: i think they understood it. that is the argument i make. i'm sure child psychologist will take issue with that. some.

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♪ charlie: here is virginia. tell me about what it was like to live in a household where you had a mother who was

obsessed by photographing that which she knew best her family. vrirginia: i think one of the things you may not appreciate about the pictures is that we were lucky to have a mother who is not home all the time. -- who was at home all the time. we found a way to work with her. even though she was assessed, it was our reality. charlie: she was taking pictures of your reality? virgina: exactly. charlie: this is collaborative. this is about us. we are part of this. we do not have to be part of this. did you want to be a photographer? was there any sense, i would love to do what mom does? virginia: no. first of all, i never showed any aptitude for it. but i never really wanted to go into anything involving photography or ms. rice: art ---

or art at all. charlie: are you and your brother and sister different in terms of how you view all this? virginia: i do not think so. i think we are all incredibly proud of this body of work and proud of what mom has achieved. but it is also something we feel we have achieved. we have been there through so much of it. sally: it is collaborative. virginia: every body of work is collaborative. we have gone through choosing which pictures will be in the show. we have gone to the openings. charlie: even if they were pictures of landscapes? virginia: i do not know how much of a say we got. we would give our opinions. she did not raise a shy children. sally: i am not so sure about that. i do listen to you. virginia: we want to get -- we will not get final veto. charlie: this made her famous

and you to a degree. did it have when you look back at it, and impact on you? virginia: i think it did. i think it did. it is hard to say because i was quite young when the book came out in 1992. 7 or 8 when the book came out. it was something i adapted to quickly. for jesse and emma, they felt the shift more severely than i did. charlie: shift in? virginia: in our life. we were suddenly traveling the world. were were known in a way we had never experience before. sally: but i think there were moments where it is character building. that is how used a sort of -- virginia: it presented its own unique challenges. i think that there are people, i find, i would say the biggest thing is i get protective of our

privacy. so people who find out who i am, and there's this debate, how do the kids turn out? i do not think that is anybody's business. i am who i am. i have my own identity. so we've gone through all of that, but it just has shaped who we are and it was character building. charlie: character building because it added a dimension to your life you had to face? virginia: exactly. but everyone has their challenges. charlie: after immediate family sally moved on. for do decades, she has been exploring themes of plays history, and mortality. ask her where she finds her inspiration. sally: the way it works for me is that i do not really make a decision about what i want to do next. it comes to me. it is like a sort of hidden ardent lover you keep to the side and it calls to you. while i was taking the family pictures, i had this, i had this desire to take landscapes.

i know this sounds completely hokey but it was true. i would have my camera set up and i would rotate the camera away from the pictures. a i am thinkinggain, 8 x 10 i would find these beautiful images on that milky ground glass of the camera. i was seduced by landscapes. i was conspicuously available for seduction because of the fact the kids were leaving home about that time. charlie: you were available for seduction. [laughs] i am available for seduction of any landscapes want me. here i am. sally: there you go. and they did. yeah. charlie: but it is part of your love for the south because you write about that in this memoir. sally: yes. in fulsome prose. charlie: yes, and then there is gigi. you write about here. sally: very important to me.

charlie: in what way? sally: i read in a book that i was raised as a feral child. my parents, this 1950's thing. very hands off. i do not know what your childhood was like -- charlie: much like yours. sally: i would be gone all day long and no one would look for me. charlie: i had complete freedom. i could go and come. i had no curfew, nothing. at no age. they trusted me. my parents trusted me. sally: i think my parents just did not care. i do not think it was trust. charlie: oh, no. maybe they knew i could take care of myself is what it was. sally: i had this unneutered beagal, and for miles we would go. i would come home and my mouth would be blackened.

i would chew the tar when i would get hungry. nobody would care. they'd wipe the tar off my mouth. charlie: i got ahead of myself. this was 2005. sally: you probably know this better than i do. charlie: that is where you do the landscapes of the south and the battlefields. sally: after that. right. emmit's hill was linked in with the deep south pictures. then the battlefields. i don't know. i'm sure you have got it on a piece of paper somewhere. charlie: it shows the evolution too. what remains was 2003. sally: there you go ok. charlie: there it was your greyhound. what was it about? wasn't about dying? was it about understanding death? sally: it started out that way, sort of as a documentary

impulse. she died, and i could not bear to leave her. so i had her skinned. then i took the body and buried it. it ended up decomposing in this almost constellation of little bones. and i went from there. it was an odd leap, but i began asking the question about the landscape in which she was buried. then there was a death on the farm. charlie: you get engaged by something like that, and boy you go on a rampage. sally: i'm a little terrier-like. charlie: you are. then because of your dead greyhound, you get interested in other dead bodies and decomposing bodies. what is your camera telling us? sally: i don't know. charlie: you just wrote a memoir about it. sally: right. i am like the dancer pavlova who did that wonderful dance.

when she was done, she's was asked what was it about? she said, if i could tell you i would not have danced about it. charlie: the book is part of your thinking about all of this and to find some meaning in it. sally: it is a huge translation. usually it is enough to take the picture and put them on the wall and assume your meaingning inss plain. and then to have to make the transition from visual art to written, it was quite interesting. it's a whole different way of thinking, to be able to talk about your work. and not so easy it turned out. charlie: john grisham said "in hold still, sally mann wraps her prose around the pictures revealing a fine talent for

writing." sally: bless his heart. charlie: wwereere words hard for you? the pictures spoke so intuitively. you show us the hard reality or the beautiful reality. sally: thank you. i try to. yeah. charlie: but are you using mortality and death and what happens, what remains? because that is what you titled it. "what remains." sally: you mean that show? yeah. you do ask that question. it is like laurie anderson saying, i feel like a library had burned down when i lost my father. you do. it is sort of a proustian notion of what finally is memory about and what does remain, how to

preserve the moment? can you? is there such a thing as an afterlife, so to speak? charlie: antietam was in that, "what remains." the largest number of casualties ever in american war on one day. you end, because you go back to the living. in that. you went back to the close-ups of your children. to say there's hope and a future. sally: exactly. the vitality and the fearlessness of those faces. that is what i love about those pictures of the children -- the faces. charlie: you are going from death to life. sally: the negative to the affirmative. yeah. charlie: and then in 2009, there is "proud flesh." sally: it may be one of my favorite bodies of work and one of the toughest.

charlie: because it is painful for you? sally: it is a difficult -- any time you make a picture of a vulnerable subject and larry is vulnerable. he has got muscular dystrophy. so whole parts of his body have lost all their muscle. his upper left arm is no, his bicep is no bigger than my wrist. he has no muscle. charlie: that is what muscular dystrophy does to. and you wanted to do this as hard as it is. sally: it is harder for him, though. it was hard for me, but it is harder for him. when you have a subject who is willing to put themselves out like that, and completely unashamed and completely willing to be in a picture that comes at the expense of his vanity. charlie: and fertility. -- fragility. sally: vulnerability, all of

that. all photographs are -- that's the risk always. no matter how public a figure you are. you are always at the mercy of the photographer. we hold all the cards and the power. charlie: so therefore, can we see trust in him? sally: i should say. he does trust me. and that's what -- there are pictures i have taken that made me just ache for him. and i would say, are you sure you want me to show these pictures? he's like, yeah. in a certain sense tha measuret of discomfort is worth it to him for the sake of what we like to think of as a piece of a4rtrt. charlie: what was his response to them? he saw the book? sally: i'm still photographing him. he's still willing to do it.

more than willing. he believes that what we make together is important. charlie: been a good marriage. sally: 45 years. the last time we sat across from each other it was 34 years. so we have managed to put in another 11. wait i'm not so good with math. yeah 11. charlie: 34 to 45 is 11. sally: thank you. you saw my math scores. they are in the book. you know i cheat. charlie: you chose the right profession, or did it choose you? sally: i think probably that. no. yeah it is a demanding mistress. charlie: when did the realization you are an artist come to you? you are not just a photographer. not that a photographer cannot just be art, but it is more than

taking pictures. sally: i was going bifurcated between writing and photography. i loved both of them. i wanted to be a poet, but how do you earn a living as a poet? hard to do. charlie: so -- sally: i guess early on. i did not think of it quite that way. i went around wearing a rakish beret and all that stuff. i wanted to be an artist. i wanted to look like an artist. the left bank of lexington. yeah, i mean i wanted to be an artist but i was not entirely sure i could pull it off. ♪

charlie: and you have not gone and reached out to every new technology that comes down the pike. have you? sally: i'm borrowing a little from the digital. i knew this was coming. yeah. i can't ingoregnore it. charlie: because it gives you power. sally: i can do more things. charlie: you can tell your story better. sally: yeah, i can get what i want better. i'm not sure i'm going to give up film or print. i love it. charlie: it's your liquid. sally: that and bourbon. [laughter] charlie: i knew that was the

reason i love you so much. silver and bourbon. that could be the next memoir. sally: that is a good title. don't you dare steal it from me. charlie: why did you title this "hold still"? sally: well i pulled it out of the text. there is one point where i am describing the feeling of taking a picture. hold still. it is italicized because it is that important. but someone said it should be titled "hold still, sergei lavrov sally mann because i am so hummingbird-ish. charlie: you are tough. you are tough. you are tough, tough on yourself and tough on your art, demanding a lot of yourself. you live in a cocoon of familyl,

but yo-- of family but you attack the world. sally: i am painfully insecure. i have this self-doubt that masquerades as vanity. other people see my career as one successpiled onto another. i see myself as reeling from both tch hto botch, failure to failure. charlie: where have you failed in your life? sally: don't ask. charlie: i'm asking. sally: i don't know. i never think it is good enough. i look back. i'm obsessively sensibly reshooting things, trying for perfection. in piety and perfection. those are the goals. charlie: would you recognize perfection if you saw it? sally: there are a few pictures that i would say are perfect. perfect. i would not change a thing. charlie: what do they contain? sally: mmm. that's sort that ineffable

something, the je ne said quois. what a copout right? charlie: but i have asked offer stars -- opera stars in a long career, are there moments onstage where you knew you had nailed it? you had put it together in a way you cannot even remember how you did it. you just know that night and that song you were there? sally: and they say? and what to they say it feels like? charlie: i remember beverly sills talking about it. she said, you just wanted to hold it. sally: yeah. it's completely ephemeral. transcendent but ephemeral at the same time. fleeting, absolutely.

charlie: there was a great story of laurence olivier who had just delivered a great shakespearean performance. and they went backstage -- sally: among many. charlie: went backstage to congratulate him. some fellow actors. he had his head in his hands. they said larry, this was unbelievable, never been better. do you know how good you are? he said, i know but i do not know how. sally: he did not know how he did it? oh yeah. the muse. that is when the muse steps in. charlie: do you believe in that? because you believe in exactly the opposite. sally: we went through this. i think that -- i said to you one time that i do not believe in talent. and you said you did, right. so i thought we should settle this once and for all, because i do believe -- i do think there

is a weighted sensibility, a privileged sensibility. and maybe that is what talent is. i think it is so vanishingly smallin the scale of things. charlie: i dot, too. i have come mostly to where you are. sally: good we have changed places. charlie: after doing this for so long and talking to so many people of enormous talent -- sally: or what you think is talent. charlie: what i think is talent. they always talk about effort. how hard it was. sally: those 10,000 hours. charlie: they all do. artists. sally: so, are you convinced now? charlie: i am more convinced. you are good because you most of all because of the labor. that goes into it. sally: the tenacity. you just have to do it and do it until you get it right. charlie: i wonder sometimes if -- that what essentially is true

is that a select few can reach that kind of greatness. and those select few are those who had something special, had something special that they put in the 10,000 hours and put in the hard work and the searing sense of this is not right. this is not right. it is not there yet. sally: but i do think there is some privileged sensibility. we are not talking about proust or mozart. we are talking about the rest of us who are making ordinary art. we are just regular people who work really hard. make ordinary art. charlie: when people saw you were, they knew they were looking at something special. they don't see what goes into it. they see what comes out of it. sally: i know. isn't that true with everything? every book you hold up when you're interviewing someone is five years of their lives?

i remember robert frank was talking about, he lived in an apartment that was a courtyard across from de kooning. he used tosee de kooning pacing vacant fourth and he realized as a photographer all here to do was hold the viewfinder to his face. and find the decisive moment. when you are a writer, or a painter, so much more difficult. that's why it took five years. because i had to, you know, i had to conjure the whole thing up from scratch. photography is all about choices, right? but wiriting is about choices, too, but you have to create the choices. they are not out there in the world for you. charlie: do you want to do it again? sally: i don't think so. charlie: you have nothing left to say? sally: god knows.

look at that -- 500 pages. charlie: but it is 2015. and you talk about everything. you talk about you, influences on your line, how photography can change the world. sally: i think it can. charlie: how so? sally: i had a big argument with eugene richards the other day. i think he is brilliant. and i mad ee that sweeping announcement that i thought photography could change the world. he said you're racrazy. he has been making the photographs that i think have changed the world. i think it is historical fact it has changed -- of course. it stopped the vietnam war. charlie: it did. sally: it change the course of the civil war, not to interrupt you. charlie: civil rights, selma. it was photographs and moving images of brutality and of violence that said to people in power -- sally: we cannot have this in

america. that is going on right now. i was walking down the street yesterday. charlie: it is a different role because everybody has a camera. sally: that was what i was going to say. a cabbie was having a fight with a woman on park avenue. i guess it was a standard new york art meant. there were three people with their cameras out videotaping. it was not even a fist. it was yelling from the windows. i thought, wow. don't tell me photography does not make a difference. right there a prevented something -- charlie: just look at something like instagram, how obsessed we are. people would rather get a photograph that some text any day of the week. sally: so what you think that is going to do to photography? charlie: it is changing politics or social media has a real impact. what you are talking about and you see that globally. we're looking at, as we take this -- tape this we are looking at a catastrophe of

grave, more than so far 3000 people killed by an earthquake in nepal. sally: so, it is that many now? charlie: close to it. sally: oh, my god. charlie: you look at a situation where people have to respond. it clearly has power and influence. yet it also contains beauty. it can take you to as paintings can, as film can to a place that only your mind can imagine. sally: but -- it's limited, a photograph is limited just in terms of what it can conjure. we are talking what it can do politically, but i was thinking as we were driving over today, i was thinking,, the difference the way photographs work with memory is so much different then other things. going back to proust, the idea

of a curling, yellow photograph is so one-dimensional. and yet there's madeleine it's got shape and form and detail, and it is three-dimensional. photography is an interesting and complicated concept. the varied ways in which it's used. charlie: here is the power, though. and this is the power in your darkroom. you choose what we see. sally: right. charlie: i see see this all the time. there will be a picture on the cover of a newspaper and then there will be a different picture inside. an. editor chose. but you chose first. you made the first choice. sally: yeah. have you ever study contact sheets? the famous picture of the little boy?

it is fascinating. there is this kid in central park. a perfect a normal kid. cap is to be holding a hand grenade. bu - --- he happens to be holding a hand grenade. 11 pitches are ordinary. and nurses one picture where he makes this terrible grimace -- 11 pictures are or near. his hands are clutched and that is the picture she chose. when you look at contact sheets and study why people chose the pictures they did, it's fascinating. charlie: there is a story of "the new york times" reporter coming to photograph you and -- basically was having trouble, was nervous. sally: that lovely -- charlie: worried to death about it. i've got to photograph the great sally mann. sally: she was so good. charlie: but she was worried to it she took pictures and you said finally, just shoot. that is what you told her. quit worrying, shoot.

sally: y4eeah. and she has one of those modern cameras where you just push it -- it is like a machine gun. i'm beginning to see the utility of them. how can you go wrong? you just push the button. just shoot. charlie: which is what briton said to me. point and shoot. sally: it is just that simple. to not worry about it, charlie. you will get a good picture. charlie: that is the point. all of this stuff of being able to frame it. but at the same time, she said she would look at all the pictures and they were all out of focus, but there was one that you saw of a hand. you aisaid that's the one. sally: we said in unison. we were scrolling through thousands of pictures. boom, just like that, yeah. charlie: let me talk about family about gigi.

kelly more about her. -- tlell me more about her. sally: there were a gigi in a. lot of people of our generation in the south they were extremely important. reynolds price wrote a lot about the importance of that person. if you are a little on paul or -- odd ball or truman capotelike or difficult like i was. i'm sure you were not an easy child, either right? and i don't know how your parents were. in my case, they were not available to me. they had other things to do. and she was all the things. charlie: let me talk about your family, your father and mother the legacy they --you tell me. sally: well you know a third of the book is devoted to

my father. he deserves every page. he is one of the most complex interesting -- charlie: an atheist. sally: he was that. that is a difficult thing to be in the south. but he was also contemptuous of television, and he was very much an intellectual and an art lover. a foodie and a sophisticate on almost every level. charlie: probably read "the new yorker." sally: and harpers and "the new republic "' "the new york times" and "the washington post." they were intellectuals. charlie: was he happy? sally: i am not entirely sure. he was a medical doctor, but he gave up to be a medical doctor and to be a devoted one, he gave up a great deal. charlie: he gave up what you are. what you are. sally: he gave up literature and

art. and those were the two things he loved. very interesting. charlie: and he knew it. sally: yeah, he did know it. and i think there was this poignancy of squandered genius about him always. charlie: you're more him than your mother's daughter? sally: other than i look almost identical to my mother, it is shocking. maybe less so now. charlie: genetics. sally: genetics, yeah. i tell the story in the book that i was walking down the street in boston and a man asked if i was elizabethn evah evans. i said i am her daughter. charlie: you think about all these relationship, things that you have taken pictures of. i assume gigi major interested

in the legacy of slavery. sally: she made me aware of it but not overtly. she was very circumspect. it was when i went to putney that iwas introduced to faulkner by a black man name to jeff campbell. even as he handed it to me, he must have known that he was opening the door to some very difficult questions. in fact yeah those questions just strolled right in. charlie: what haven't you done? what questions have you not answer through photography for yourself? what do you owe us you have not done? sally: i'm working on this project -- i touch on in the book. it is devoted to gigi. it is a testimony perhaps to gigi in her importance, but i'm working on patricia blackman.

it's bigger than that. i am working on the legacy of slavery and the south, which i think is one of the most under discussed and profound phenomena. and in the whole united states. but particularly in the south. i'm focusing on the nature of what kept the slaves alive. what kept their hope alive. focusing on the nat turner rebellion. charlie: how will you do this? sally: you would think i would have an answer to this, but i do not quite know yet. i'm photographing the dismal swamp and the trivers in the neighborhoods of nat turner's rebellion. because that is where he was going. it offered refuge to desperate slaves because they would not track them into the dismal swap mp. charlie: fear of alligators. sally: fear of everything.

that place is awful. now they discovered these villages. sio i'm photographing those. it is fascinating the whole question of how slavery has affected the south, which is a kind of large topic. yeah. so black ma,n rivers, i am photographing little churches the importance of religion. charlie: how about courthouses? sally: you know, that is a good idea. charlie: are you series? because it is about a certain kind of justice. sally: yeah exactly. courthouses. i was thinking of song, too, how that -- and the night sky. surelyl the night sky was of critical importance to escape and communication. anyway, who knows? charlie: because you have looked

at history so much, and because you have looked at death and decay so much, do you feel any sense of mortality and rushing to finish so many things that you -- sally: do i ever. all i have to do is look in the mirror. i do not have to look at death and decay. charlie: what you see when you look in the mirror? sally: i'm shocked every time i do. charlie: how would you like to be on television for 25 years? sally: i can only imagine. it is bad enough being on television for 25 minutes. when they brought the screen over i was aghast. charlie: there is this sense of urgency to do a lot. sally: there is. absolutely. i'm frantic. i don't waste any time. i do not waste time. i work all the time. i never leave home.

i mean, i just say honed in on what's ahead. i'm sure you do , too. it is the only way. charlie: i was thinking about it. in the end, it's love and work. freud and shakespeare, whoever deserves credit. friends, loves of the world around you. and at the same time, it is work. to find your place. find a place you can stand -- sally: and leave your mark. charlie: and that connects you to your father. thank you for this. sally: thank you. charlie: my thanks for my collect for th -- themy colleague for the hard work on the sally mann conversation and edit. ♪

♪ angie: state of emergency, a crisis summit for the greek bailout. rise and fall, shares in shanghai in the biggest loss in six years. and democracy deadlock, hong kong has a new political fight after lawmakers reject beijing's election plan. good day to you, welcome to