This is a book of remarkable images, intense and intimate, recording the photographer's children as they explore their woodland home in Virginia. The photographs show the ambiguities and dramas of family life and hauntingly evoke the mysteries of childhood. Sally Mann herself says in the introduction: 'These are photographs of my children ... many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river.' The result is a book that is ethereal, tender and sometimes disquieting.

A collection of pictures which record the photographer's children as they explore their woodland home in Virginia. They show the ambiguity and dramas of family life - some are posed and some are real - and the images range from the fantastic to the everyday.

2000-09-05 Recommended for those who appreciate art photography

A very good book which deals intimately with family life. Sally Mann is clearly the loving mother of some very self-possessed and self-aware children. I was concerned before I saw the book about some of the tales that I had heard regarding the content. Frankly, anyone who finds this book prurient needs psychiatric help. Some of the pictures are shocking, it is true, but not in that sense- the viewer is shocked by an awareness of their own inability to help when confronted with the image of a boy with a smashed nose and lip or a girl, unconscious on the surgeon's table, with multiple stitches in a gash on her forehead. Mann understands her antecedents, and there are strong echoes of Weston and Eugene Smith to name but two in this work. The fact is that bringing up children (and I speak as the father of four) is both shocking and beautiful, as are these pictures.