In gallery shows, museum exhibitions, newspaper interviews, magazine features, film documentaries and photography books (Immediate Family; Deep South), artist Sally Mann hasn't shied from revealing pieces of her personal life and aesthetic motivation. In her illustrated memoir, Hold Still, she goes further toward exposing the woman behind the photographs and her family roots. With a remarkably candid voice--sometimes sassy, sometimes pensive--she pulls us along on a journey into her past, precipitated by a careful dig into cartons of old family correspondence, snapshots, diaries and bric-a-brac long stored untouched in her farmhouse in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
From her days as an "impertinent scalawag"--who in 1967 went off to prep school in Putney, Vt., as a self-described "dumb peckerwood cracker, with a trunkful of very uncool reversible wrap-around skirts"--to a renowned artist delivering the 2011 Massey Lecture Series at Harvard, Mann recalls her life and her background. Hers is a past that subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) finds its way into the many old family snapshots and carefully crafted Mann photos aptly displayed throughout the memoir.
With an almost nonchalant narrative flow, Hold Still is Sally Mann's take not just on her life, but also on the underlying complexities of love, family, home and art. It abounds with the drama of newly uncovered family history, meditations on death, adoration of her husband and children and conversations with her artist neighbor Cy Twombly. Mann writes of her life the way she photographs others: "The camera was always set up off to the side and when something interesting happened, I would ask for everyone to hold still." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.