Throughout the history of photography, with all its erotic domestic images by Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Emmett Gowin and others, no woman has ever turned the camera so candidly on a man. With fully half the nation's marriages ending in divorce, the intimacy these pictures extol must seem to many viewers more mysterious than titillating. Ms. Mann says, ''were the everyday pictures on which the icons were built that gave them meaning. Our marriage has been going for a long time, and the new pictures arise out of a curiosity about that everydayness, about the 'glue' that holds a marriage together. There is flip side to the myth of Pygmalion, in which an artist falls in love with his creation and brings it to life.
Art can intrude on reality, ride roughshod over relationships.
It changed our lives,'' she says. It made her children celebrities and forced her and Mr. Mann to confront a process that may have made them all grow up too quickly. ''I can't tell you how many commerical offers we refused,'' she says. The images themselves became fair game for attack and appropriation from all quarters. Kathryn Harrison used them as the basis for a novel about pedophilia, an arrogation that still distresses Ms. Mann. The film director James Cameron copied an image from ''Immediate Family'' and displayed it prominently in ''Titanic'' without Ms. Mann's permission.