Mann has photographed her husband, Larry, regularly since they met in 1969, and in the early 2000s she began to document the transformations to his body caused by muscular dystrophy. She called this series Proud Flesh, a term for the scar tissue that forms over a horse’s wounds. The individual titles for the pictures reference a variety of literary sources, including classical mythology, the Bible, and the works of modern writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Eudora Welty. Mann, who studied literature as an undergraduate and earned an MA in creative writing, frequently draws inspiration from novels and poetry.