JESSIE AGAIN.(The Talk of the Town)

Jessie Mann has chiselled shoulders and dark eyes set deep in their sockets. She is twenty-five and looks pretty much the way she did when she was three and eight and twelve, and her mother, Sally Mann, was taking photographs of her that, depending on whom you asked, were either exploitative obscenities or innocence incarnate. The photographs showed her as a ferally beautiful river kid, her body crusted with mud or wreathed with night-blooming cereus or hanging naked from a hay hook. Over the past four years, she has been posing again, for a new collection of portraits by the photographer Len Prince. It is a loaded second act, as if one of Velazquez's infantas had grown up and sat for Rembrandt.

The interim between musehoods has been rich but complicated for Jessie, the middle of three children. "The best analogy I have for it is the Glass family in the Salinger novels," she said several years ago. Since modelling for her mother's "Immediate Family" series, in 1993, Jessie has shaved her legs (and her head), gone to science camp, and worked as a pastry chef. She started drinking, early and excessively; dropped out of high school in Virginia; went north to a Quaker boarding school; and graduated from Washington and Lee with a degree in psychology. After college, she moved to a tumbledown plantation, where she grows squash and peas. "I can't get away from the country," she said recently, but admitted that she sometimes tills her plot in what she calls her "miniskirt boots."

The house where Jessie lives is fifteen minutes from where she was raised, in Lexington, Virginia. For a while, she was set on training to be an ob-gyn, but she started painting seriously (with the encouragement of Cy Twombly, a family friend), and, more recently, her collaboration with Prince has been consuming. "There, on a white leather banquette, was Jessie, with her legs curled up," Prince, who is fifty-three, said, recalling their first meeting, in New York. "She reached out, and I think I kissed her hand." The next ...