Many explore typical childhood activities at the family's remote summer cabin along the Maury River (skinny dipping, reading the funnies, dressing up, vamping, napping, playing board games) but others touch on darker themes such as insecurity, loneliness, injury, sexuality and death.

"[3] Dr. Aaron Esman, a child psychiatrist at the Payne Whitney Clinic believes that Mann is serious about her work and that she has "no intention to jeopardize her children or use them for pornographic images".

[6] In a cover story for The New York Times Magazine, Richard B. Woodward wrote that "Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world".

"[8] Blake Morrison commented that Immediate Family made Mann famous for the wrong reasons; "because critics exaggerated the intimacy of the photos at the expense of their artfulness; and because the American religious right accused her of pornography when her camera was capturing beauty and transience.

Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play.

What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events.

[12] Critics agreed, saying her "vision in large measure [is] accurate, and a welcome corrective to familiar notions of youth as a time of unalloyed sweetness and innocence",[13] and that the book "created a place that looked like Eden, then cast upon it the subdued and shifting light of nostalgia, sexuality and death".

[15] According to writer Bruce Handy, the Christian right conflated naturalistic nudes of children by Mann and Jock Sturges with sexualized images by photographers such as David Hamilton.

Spurred on by activists such as Randall Terry, an Alabama grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble for selling child pornography.

[15] However, academics such as Connie Samaras criticized complaints from feminist groups, like women against pornography (WAP), about Mann's work arguing "nakedness, even if it suggests lawlessness... has central meaning to many people's lives for a wide variety of legitimate reasons.

An example she cites is a photo entitled The Perfect Tomato, in which the viewer sees a nude Jessie, posing on a picnic table outside, bathed in light.

[22] Mann was never charged with the taking or selling of child pornography, though according to Edward de Grazia, law professor and civil liberties expert, "any federal prosecutor anywhere in the country could bring a case against [Mann] in Virginia, and not only seize her photos, her equipment, her Rolodexes, but also seize her children for psychiatric and physical examination".

In an interview with New York Times reporter, Richard Woodward, she said "I thought the book could wait 10 years, when the kids won't be living in the same bodies.

However, to protect the children from "teasing", Mann told Woodward that she wanted to keep copies of Immediate Family out of their home town of Lexington.