I'm, in many cases, trying to actually show something about a larger concept, whereas the snapshots are just that. For one thing, they're fictions to a large extent, and they're in service of a concept.

And those somehow, to me, resonate on an entirely different level than the snapshots, if that's making any sense. And then there are the more iconic, black and white, printed-quite-large art photographs - and I'd put that in sort of quotes - photographs of the children. Well, I have, you know, boxes and boxes and scrapbooks filled with everyday, normal, quotidian pictures of the children just doing their regular stuff. GROSS: Those are the only ones I've seen. You mean - you're talking about my art photographs, right? GROSS: But do you feel like the photos you've taken of your family - the many photos you've taken of your children and your husband - have supplanted your actual memories of them? So, I mean, this is not an unusual argument. I think that's using photographs as an instrument of memory is probably a mistake because I think that photographs actually sort of impoverish your memory - in certain ways, sort of take away all the other senses - the sense of smell and taste and texture and all that kind of stuff.

And I think I know what you mean, in the sense that a lot of my memories of my parents, who died several years ago - a lot of my most vivid memories of how they look come from the photos that I've seen over and over again from different stages of their life. And you write that photos don't preserve our past as much as they supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. GROSS: Many of the photos in this book are of your family. Now she reflects on her work, her life and her family history in the new book 'Hold Still: A Memoir With Photographs.' In a review in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Francine Prose described it as a wonderfully weird and vivid memoir. Her work has included a series of photos of decomposing bodies in the University of Tennessee forensic anthropology research facility and photos of her husband and his muscles that are withering from muscular dystrophy. After those photos, she moved on to what she describes as deeply personal explorations of the landscape of the American South, the nature of mortality and the mortality of nature, intimate depictions of her husband and the indelible marks slavery left on the world surrounding her.

My guest, Sally Mann, became famous - or notorious - in the early '90s for her photographs of her young children, naked, in poses that were often interpreted as eroticizing their bodies.

Hold Still by Sally Mann