In 1987, the photographer Sally Mann wrote in a letter to a friend that she often found it difficult “to reconcile one’s work with one’s life.” She had recently watched her seven-year-old son, Emmett, leap in front of a car and be hurled fifty feet to the asphalt, and though the boy suffered only minor injuries, Mann’s residual terror was threatening to upend a photo project to which she’d already devoted two years.
Hold Still Sally Mann Summary
In retrospect, Mann’s letter seems eerily prescient. Five years later, when those photos debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, they provoked a national clamor. The shots—of Mann’s son and two young daughters, sometimes clothed and sometimes not—were, depending on the viewer, either brilliant depictions of feral innocence or lurid images bordering on child pornography. Trying to reconcile Mann’s work with her life became, for a brief time, a kind of national pastime.
An Amazon Best Book of May 2015: If you have ever seen Sally Mann's photography you understand her ability to capture emotion and generate conversation. In Hold Still Mann has changed mediums but continues to deliver a strikingly rich composition. Soaked in Southern history and heritage, Mann takes us through her childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains and her life as a mother, wife, and photographer. In Hold Still, Sally Mann discloses that the month she was conceived, her father—a doctor but also an art collector and connoisseur—wrote of his hope for someone in the next generation to be artistic.
The memory of that clamor, along with curiosity about what Mann must’ve felt, as the object of so much vitriol, lends immediate appeal to Mann’s new book, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. And while Hold Still satisfies that curiosity, it also takes us behind the camera of an artist who has spent more than three decades photographing in the South, the woman Time magazine once deemed “America’s best photographer.”
Sally Mann: Hold Still $ 32.00. A revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. National Book Award Finalist. HOME; ABOUT; SELECTED WORKS; BOOKS; Press; OTHER MEDIA.
From a certain angle, Mann’s life doesn’t appear tailored to memoir treatment. She was born in Virginia in 1951 and enjoyed a prosperous, horsey childhood that left few if any scars. She married at the age of nineteen and has remained married ever since. And she’s spent most of her life so rooted to the family’s 365-acre farm on the Maury River that her husband “once irritatedly clocked five weeks during which I didn’t so much as go to the grocery store.” But then this is Sally Mann we’re talking about: an artist whose take on the most tranquil and quotidian of subjects—her own children, playing beside a river—triggered a firestorm. In prose, as in photography, it’s all about the eye. How Mann sees a subject is often more intriguing than the subject itself.
With the same “magpie aesthetic” that has marked her photography career and turned her lens to whatever might lie in its viewfinder (be it kids, kudzu, corpses, or moody Southern landscapes), Mann wanders through the story of her own life—the centrality of family and farm—with agile charisma. She also provides an illustrated examination of her photographic techniques that somehow—and this is terribly rare, whenever an artist interrogates his or her own work—captures the process without vacuuming the mystery out of it. The equanimity of her own life story, notoriety aside, is counterbalanced by the “payload of southern gothic” she finds when sifting through the family history: “deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs,” and so on, up to and including “bloody murder.” On a quieter note, she’s particularly nimble in her consideration of Virginia “Gee-Gee” Carter, an African American woman who worked for her family for half a century, and helped raise Sally.
Most affecting, however, might be her depiction of her father, Robert S. Munger, “a renegade Texan with an excellent northern education, an atheist, and an intellectual,” a physician who loved dogs, art, fast foreign cars, and amateur photography. Mann connects the dots between his artistic impulses and hers, but also traces her own preoccupations with “the ineffable beauty of decrepitude, of evanescence, of mortality”—most vividly seen in a series of photographs of dead bodies that Mann debuted in 2003—to those of her father.
But in examining her memories of the man, Mann makes a stirring—and, for her, troubling—discovery. Those memories have been corroded by photography. When trying to envision her father, what she envisions, instead, are photographs of him. She diagnoses a modern condition that, upon reflection, might be familiar to any of us whose memories of a long-lost grandparent are based upon old snapshots—less of a person than of an image.
“It is because of the many pictures I have of my father that he eludes me completely,” she writes. “In my outrageously disloyal memory he does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures…. It isn’t death that stole my father from me; it’s the photographs.” This is one of the more powerful reckonings in a book that’s loaded with them. It’s a profound self-portrait of an artist and her medium, and of the people and landscapes that have fueled that art.
Does photographer Sally Mann really have a bulging file called “Maternal Slights,” as she writes in her courageous and visually ravishing memoir, Hold Still?
“Are you kidding? Oh my gosh. I can put my hand on it right now!” Mann says during a call to her home on cherished and much-photographed farmland in the small Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, Virginia, where she grew up. Mann, who is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost photographers, lives there with her husband, Larry, an artist-turned-lawyer she met when she was 18 and married soon after. Their three children, subjects of Mann’s beautiful but controversial 1992 photography project Immediate Family, are adults now, living their own lives.
“I’m so mean-spirited,” Mann continues, “I wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them.” An example Mann recounts in Hold Still is that her mother planned a trip to Europe that began just days before Mann was to give birth.
Mann's stunning memoir is part family history, part photo album, part aesthetic manifesto.
“She was oblivious to the effect of things like that. Just oblivious. And that’s because she herself had been so badly injured. I knew she had had a rough time, but until I did the research for this book, I didn’t realize the full extent of what her childhood and her adulthood—I mean, being married to my father was no picnic—had been like. In the end, one of the main things that came out of writing this book was this profound regret that I hadn’t been a better daughter. It troubles me no end, even now.”
Mann’s revelatory investigation of the fascinating, wounded histories on both sides of her family—and the shocking tragedy of her husband’s parents—began with an invitation to deliver the Massey lectures at Harvard University. In preparation, she began opening boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, newspaper clippings and other papers that had been gathering dust in her attic—uncovering, as it were, family secrets—and found herself “wondering what part of these lives, this dolorous DNA, has made me who I am.” This is a central question of Hold Still, which is part personal memoir (a word Mann says she hates), part family history, part brilliant photo album and part aesthetic manifesto.
“I think we turn into what our genes tell us to turn into, to a large extent,” Mann says. What that means for her memoir is that each family story leads inexorably to a searching, vividly written examination of one of the obsessions that are the subjects of her sublime photographs, some of which are reproduced in the book.
Sally Mann and her husband, Larry, at their 1970 wedding in her parents’ garden.
An example? In the book’s fourth and final section Mann writes about her father, an emotionally distant but compassionate country doctor she describes as a man with an “air of solipsistic distraction,” a passion for art and a lifelong fascination with death. This leads to a profound discussion of the fearless work compiled in Mann’s book What Remains, which includes photographs she took of dead bodies at the University of Tennessee forensic research facility known as the Body Farm, and of the photographs she took of the body of her father, who committed suicide to end a long illness.
“I talk very cavalierly and confidently about photographing those bodies,” Mann says. “But the first ones I saw were a shock. It was hard. Once I got used to it, I found it helpful to accept that part of death, the physical decay. I’m more than fine with that. What I don’t want is to die until I’m ready to die. Like everybody else, I want to have everything tied up. I want my bed to be made. I want the perfect death.”
Similarly, a regretful consideration of all she failed to ask about the life of Gee-Gee, the African-American woman who raised her and who, more than her own parents, offered Sally unconditional love, propelled Mann into a photography project that explores the emotional and physical landscapes that are a legacy of slavery.
And Mann’s investigation of the hidden life of her mother’s family, especially the life of her sentimental grandfather and his nostalgic love of the land, leads her to write passionately about the place where she has lived all her life and the impulses behind her haunting photographs of Southern landscapes.
“I derive so much strength from being in the South,” Mann says. “It can be hideous in places, but there’s just something fundamentally gorgeous about the South.”
Still, as a young would-be artist from the South, Mann found it painful to be far from the cultural power of New York. She says she and Larry lacked the funds, and she herself lacked the courage, to move to New York. “I put my faith in my work, as I always have, and believed that if it was good enough it wouldn’t be ignored.”
Southern landscapes have been a key part of Mann's work (Ben Salem, Virginia, Copyright © Sally Mann).
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Mann’s breakthrough came with the Immediate Family pictures, which catapulted her to international fame—or maybe infamy. The critical attention she received was clearly a mixed blessing. In some quarters she was vilified for a collection that included nude photographs of her young children. Her harshest critic called her a child pornographer.
Sally Mann Books
In a riveting passage in Hold Still, Mann offers a kind of rejoinder. There, in wonderfully expressive pictures and text, she dissects the aesthetics of a sequence of photographs of her young son who stands naked and shivering in the river at the edge of the family property. One of these pictures found its way into the Immediate Family portfolio. Mann’s exposition offers an illuminating analysis of why she chose one picture over another, of what makes one photograph more beautiful than another. “When I see a good picture of my own,” Mann says, “when it comes up in the developer, my heart will skip a beat. I’ll have a physical reaction. It’s like, as some Romantic poet said, you’ve taken a mortal blow to your chest.”
Great pictures or not, Mann says one of her concerns about the publication of Hold Still is of “dredging all that up again. I didn’t want that to be the focus when the family pictures came out, and I don’t want that to be the focus now. One of the questions back then was, have I done something that is going to irremediably change the kids? It’s good to get to the end of that long tunnel and find that things are OK.”
In her early 20s, a few years after she had begun taking pictures with her first good camera, Mann got a master’s degree in creative writing. “Back then I thought it was possible to marry writing and photography artistically,” she explains. “Naturally that was a dismal failure. Because who can actually do that?”
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Forty years later, Hold Still, a glorious marriage of words and pictures, will lead a reader to conclude that, actually, Mann has done it.
Hold Still Sally Mann
This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.