In her black-and-white photographs, the artist carefully documents the raw and intimate moments of her life, whether it is photographing her children or depicting the everyday moments of her idyllic Southern home. The series Immediate Family (1984-91) depicts the tender moments of Mann’s children playing, sleeping, eating, and swimming. “The way I approach photography is very spontaneous. The children were there, so I took pictures of my children,” she says. The Ditch (1987) depicts Mann’s son Emmet playing in a ditch near the artist’s Virginia house. He is lying on his back with his legs tucked underneath in a ditch filled with water, surrounded by children and adults standing on either side. In Hot Dog (1989), Emmett lies sleeping on the ground beside the family’s childhood dog. Likewise, in her Dog Bones series (2000), the artist collected a series of dog bones lying around her house and began photographing them. In describing her process, Mann says, “I see a dog bone, I bring it in, I take a picture; I like the picture.” Whether it is depicting her family or the bones chewed up by her dogs, much of Mann’s body of work comes from observing what is closest to her at hand. 

In addition to photographing her family and nearby surroundings, the artist also looks at the American South in her work, photographing the landscapes of Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia. In these landscape photographs, Mann uses a wet-plate collodion process, a difficult and time-sensitive technique that requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter. She also works with deliberately damaged lenses, inviting scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus in her photographs. In works such as her Deep South series, Mann embraces the foggy and unpredictable quality of the images, showing an unchanged yet unidentifiable Southern landscape. “You know, if it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I mean, I love that. That aspect of photography. The mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me,” the artist says. Whether photographing her family, her immediate environment, or the Southern landscape, Mann constructs a body of work focused on the tender, intimate, and raw moments surrounding her.