Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

by Sally Mann

A revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder. In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

• ISBN10: 0316247758
• ISBN13: 9780316247757
• Publish Date: 26 April 2016 (first published 12 May 2015)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Imprint: Back Bay Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 496
• Language: English

Reviews

[jnkay01]

A must-read exploration of a photographer's creative process.

From my AP review:

American photographer Sally Mann is best known to mainstream audiences for her third book, "Immediate Family," which stirred controversy in the early 1990s for its inclusion of nude images of her three young children roaming her family's secluded, Eden-like farm.

In Mann's illustrated memoir, "Hold Still," the allegations that she harmed her children by making and publishing the images still sting, but Mann defies expectations to explain herself as a mother or to assure readers that her children turned out OK (she offers no updates except their permission to reprint their images, including some not included in the previous book).

Instead, Mann explains herself as an artist, putting the "family pictures," as she calls them, into the broader context of her photography exploring the South, an ancestral preoccupation with mortality and her bonds with a landscape still haunted by the legacy of slavery. ... Read more here: http://apne.ws/1Hf5mzc