Hold Still

by Sally Mann

[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