sally mann hold still a memoir with photographs

I’ve been trying to find out whether the more outweighs the less (I don’t think it does for me), and I’ve also been trying to find out whether that’s just based on my own expectations (it’s very possible).

I feel compelled to preface this review with the above because I didn’t really think too much about any of it before reading the book, and I ended up feeling I got more than I probably subconsciously asked for, and less. Another part of your enjoyment will probably be determined by how closely you’d like the book to remain to what is probably going to get many, if not most people interested in the book in the first place, Mann’s photographs. Your enjoyment of the book will depend on how closely you will stick to the idea of memoir. A boldly alive, bracingly honest, thoroughly engrossing, sun-dappled, and deeply shadowed tale of inheritance and defiance, creativity and remembrance by an audacious and tenacious American photographer.The subtitle of Sally Mann‘s Hold Still is given as A Memoir with Photographs, which it well might be, depending on how you flexible you want to be with the term “memoir.” I’d say that the book is in part that, a memoir, and in other parts, it’s clearly not. Mann also scrutinizes her relationship with Gee-Gee, the African American woman who ran their household for 50 years. Here, too, are staggering family secrets, including her in-laws’ deceptive lives and violent deaths, her Mayflower-blue-blood mother’s scandalously unconventional childhood, and her self-sacrificing country-doctor father’s complicated legacy of slave ownership, wealth, and philanthropy. She also shares, for the first time, the dark side of her notoriety, as well as the daring adventures behind more recent photographic series.

Mann confesses her aversion to wearing clothes as a “near-feral child,” and her lifelong love for the land on which she and her husband have lived for more than 40 years.

Writing was Mann’s first creative calling, and her prose has the same firepower as the many photographs that illustrate this searching, witty, and gothic inquiry into family, place, and art. In spite of the controversy, Mann has never compromised her intrepid visual curiosity or forensic lyricism, and now, in this zestful, lushly textured, candid, and jolting family memoir, she reveals the deep wellsprings of her most poetic and disconcerting images. Photographer Mann’s book, Immediate Family (1992), aroused immediate outrage over its nude photographs of her three beloved children at their secluded Virginia farm.

Sally mann hold still a memoir with photographs