Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

by Sally Mann

Overview

This National Book Award finalist is 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316247757
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/26/2016
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	152,977
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally.

Her many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh and the Spirit (2010). A feature film about her work, What Remains, debuted to critical acclaim in 2006. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Meuse ix

Part 1 Family Ties: The Importance of Place

1 The Sight of My Eye 3

2 All the Pretty Horses 9

3 The Bending Arc 17

4 The Family of Mann 43

5 The Remove 63

6 Our Farm-And the Photographs I Took There 87

7 Hold Still 99

8 Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus Est 131

Part 2 My Mother: Memory of a Memory Past

9 A Sentimental Welshman 169

10 Uncle Skip and the Little Dears 185

11 The Southern Landscape 203

Part 3 Gee-Gee: The Matter of Race

12 The Many Questions 243

13 Hamoo 267

14 Smothers 273

15 The Kid on the Road 277

16 Who Wants to Talk About Slavery? 279

Part 4 My Father: Against the Current of Desire

17 The Munger System 297

18 Leaving Dallas 347

19 Mr. Death and His Blue-Eyed Boy 357

20 World Traveler, Interesting Gent 379

21 The Cradle and the Grave 399

22 Bearing Witness 411

23 The Sublime End 419

24 The X Above My Head 435

Postscript: Exhibit A, Exhibit B 458

Acknowledgments 479

Photo Credits 482

What People are Saying About This

Pat Conroy

Photographer Sally Mann's book Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South. Written in her pitch perfect prose style, it is a textbook of illumination and desire for anyone who hears the siren call of art beckoning to them. It's southern to the bone, hell on wheels. Hold Still is a masterpiece. --Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini and South of Broad

Editorial Reviews

"Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary. Fiercely beautiful. My kind of true adventure."—Patti Smith, musician and National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids

"One would not need to know Sally Mann's remarkable work as a photographer to be swept up in her memoir Hold Still, which draws upon a family history so rife with jaw-dropping drama that it could provide the grist for a dozen novels. With prodigious intellect and a telling instinct for the exact detail that will reveal character or throw it into question, Mann delves into the treacherous territory of memory, mesmerized by the relentless dance of beauty and decay. In doing so, she manifests in prose the acuity of seeing that has propelled her to the top rank of contemporary artists."—Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon

"Photographer Sally Mann's book Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South. Written in her pitch perfect prose style, it is a textbook of illumination and desire for anyone who hears the siren call of art beckoning to them. It's southern to the bone, hell on wheels. Hold Still is a masterpiece."—Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini and South of Broad

"In Hold Still, Sally Mann demonstrates a talent for storytelling that rivals her talent for photography. The book is riveting, ravishing — diving deep into family history to find the origins of art. I couldn't take my eyes off of it."—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

"For three decades Sally Mann has captured images that are unique, haunting, beautiful, disturbing, stark - it would take a mid-sized thesaurus to hold all the adjectives that have been used to describe both the art and the artist. In Hold Still, she wraps her prose around her pictures, revealing a fine talent for writing and a rich family history."—John Grisham, author of The Firm and Sycamore Row

"Sally Mann's Hold Still is just like her pictures: forthright, adventurous, loving, fearless, beautiful, intimate, and somehow uncanny. That means it's probably just like her."—Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings

"What I admire most about Sally Mann's new book is not her ability to write captivating sentences—she does. It's the honesty and fearlessness, the two mixed together, compelling her to own up to her mistakes, to acknowledge her winnings, to accept her losses (and those of her family). For this quality alone, Hold Still deserves a fixed place in the library of American memoir."—Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

"There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself."—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love is Gone

"This spectacular modern memoir reads like a sweeping gothic novel, filled with mystery, violence, controversy, and, of course, love in all its forms. It is a literary family album enlivened by many of the images in the stories told. A Southern work, it is also universally accessible, as all of Sally Mann's work is, for she reaches deep into her ancestral headwaters and the twisted rivers of human remembrance. A triumph."—Jamie Lee Curtis, actress

"Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann's steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance, and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise - subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love."—Reynolds Price, Time

From the Publisher

…[a] wonderfully weird and vivid memoir—generously illustrated with family snapshots, [Mann's] own and other people's photos, documents and letters…At moments Hold Still may remind you of certain friends and relatives who seem to have been born with a desire to push people's buttons and a penchant for being genuinely surprised, even upset, when this provokes a response. In life, such people are maddening, inspired, rarely dull and often a lot of fun, all of which can be said about Sally Mann's memoir.

The New York Times Book Review - Francine Prose

…weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful…Ms. Mann has got [a] gift for fine and offbeat declaration. She's also led a big Southern-bohemian life, rich with incident. Or maybe it only seems rich with incident because of an old maxim that still holds: Stories happen only to people who can tell them…The best quality of Hold Still—a book that strikes me as an instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last 50 years—is its ambient sense of an original, come-as-you-are life that has been well lived and well observed. It's a book that dials open the aperture on your own senses. Like the photographs she most admires, it is rooted in particulars yet has "some rudiment of the eternal in it."

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 02/23/2015
Photographer Mann’s sensuous and searching memoir finds her pulling out family records from the attic, raising questions about the unexamined past and how photographs “rob all of us of our memory,” and calling upon ancestry to explain the mysteries of her own character. Rockbridge County, Va., a place of great beauty, is the site of Mann’s uncontained childhood; her wedding to her lifelong companion, Larry Mann; and the idyllic family farm, where she took the photographs collected in Immediate Family (1992). Those photos of her three young children in the nude, and the controversy that erupted around them, “changed all our lives in ways we never could have predicted, in ways that affect us still,” she says, firmly stressing that photography is mere artifice, that the images “are not my children.” The pictures and fallout attracted a fanatic stalker, who kept the Mann family on edge for years. (Indeed, this memoir periodically reads like a crime thriller.) Mann’s power at evoking the raw fear that comes with being a parent is uncanny, and she is equally insightful when discussing her own childhood. Her book is also a catalogue of material objects—letters, test grades, teacher reports, even a letter of complaint from the superintendent of schools regarding 16-year-old Mann’s wild driving. The vivid descriptive energy and arresting images in this impressive book will leave readers breathless. Illus. (May)

Publishers Weekly

04/15/2015
Here photographer Mann chronicles her rich and eccentric family history, told through the exploration of old documents and images stored away in her attic. What started out as a series of lectures for Harvard University ended up as a personal, 400-plus-page memoir that recounts tales of "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land…and maybe even bloody murder." Raw and darkly humorous, Mann's writing is consistently honest and poignant as she depicts her beloved Virginia farm, her childhood, her parents, and her children. She further discusses how her passion for photography evolved, thus offering an intimate look into the artist's life and creative process. Illustrated throughout with personal and vintage photographs, the book also provides an in-depth discussion of Mann's now-infamous body of work Immediate Family, the provocative series featuring her three young children that cemented her place as a major artist. VERDICT This title is for anyone interested in the career and experience of one of the 20th century's most important figures. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]—Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ., PA

Library Journal

2015-02-15
A journey of self-discovery begins in family archives.An invitation to deliver the prestigious Massey lectures at Harvard inspired photographer Mann (Sally Mann: Immediate Family, 2014, etc.) to embark on a search for her past, beginning with boxes stored in her family's attic. She hoped to find "a payload of southern gothic": juicy details of "deceit and scandal," including suicides, fortunes made and lost, and even a murder. Her sources did not disappoint her, and she effectively weaves a "tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend" in this candid and engrossing memoir. An incorrigible child, Mann loved to cavort naked on the Virginia farm where she grew up. Her mother, exasperated, turned over her care to Gee-Gee, the loving African-American woman who served as the family's housekeeper, cook, and nanny. Mann's rebellion continued throughout high school, where she discovered a passion for writing and photography that channeled her energies. "I existed in a welter of creativity," she recalls, "—sleepless, anxious, self-doubting, pressing for both perfection and impiety, like some ungodly cross between a hummingbird and a bulldozer." Married at 18, she continued her creative life at Bennington College and made photography her vocation. For the next several decades, she "virtually lived in the darkroom," dealing with "some end-of-tether frustrations" in printing her work. She was "blindsided," she writes, when she was accused of child abuse and exploitation after the publication of Immediate Family (1992), which included nude photographs of her children. Besides revealing portraits of her parents and Gee-Gee, Mann chronicles the sordid murder-suicide of her husband's parents; a deranged letter-writer later accused Mann and her husband of the crime. Although committed to photography as an art, Mann is troubled by the medium's "treacheries"—i.e., its power to displace real memories. Generously illustrated, Mann's memoir is testimony to photography's power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.

Kirkus Reviews