How Mann sees a subject is often more intriguing than the subject itself. In prose, as in photography, it’s all about the eye. 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. She married at the age of nineteen and has remained married ever since. She was born in Virginia in 1951 and enjoyed a prosperous, horsey childhood that left few if any scars. 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.”įrom a certain angle, Mann’s life doesn’t appear tailored to memoir treatment. 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. Trying to reconcile Mann’s work with her life became, for a brief time, a kind of national pastime. 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.
Five years later, when those photos debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, they provoked a national clamor. In retrospect, Mann’s letter seems eerily prescient. 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.
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