Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, by Sally Mann. Little, Brown & Company, 2015. 482 pp.
Lexington, Virginia, native Sally Mann is known as a photographer, largely of the South. Reading her memoir makes clear that she’s a fine writer, too.
“Hold Still” isn’t an easy read: It’s likely you’ll find yourself raising more questions than settling into comfortable answers when you’ve finished the book. And there’s a chunk of this book that seems to have been written as the final word in the years-long debate about the subjects she photographed: her children, partially or fully nude; corpses in the Tennessee Body Farm; her son, in the wake of a car accident.
But, like her photographs, her writing is often breathtakingly beautiful. And, always, honest. She draws a clear distinction between her children as her children and her children as photographs:
“The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time….these are children in a photograph.”
More than half of Mann’s book deals with her lineage—both her mother and father came from families with numerous black sheep and dubious parenting skills. But the sections on her mother, her father, and her nanny Gee-Gee are storytelling at its best—both heartbreaking and familiar to anyone raised in the South, or in the 1950s.
Mann writes beautifully about Lexington, her farm along the Maury River and her friendship with artist Cy Twombly (with whom she used to sit outside the Rockbridge County Wal-Mart and watch people and the light on the far mountains).
Memoirs by definition are self-involved. The really good ones share deep truths that shed light on the larger world. “Hold Still” is bold and beautiful, difficult and daring…and, yes, really good.
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, by Sally Mann. Little, Brown & Company, 2015. 482 pp.
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2022 issue.
