sally mann hold still a memoir with photographs

Of course, this chapter plays off against the overall background of the American South, which in itself features prominently in the book.

There also is a larger chapter on race, which uses an African-American woman employed by Mann’s father as a nanny as the spring board. As someone writing a memoir is wont to be doing, Mann detects traces of her own personality in those that came before her. Instead, the reader is provided with a lot of detail of the author’s family, going back generations. What happened during the making of those photographs that made Mann famous (her family work), say, is largely left out of the book, a few crumbs here and there notwithstanding. Beyond that, however, I’m not sure the word memoir applies all that well. The reader is given ample insight into her childhood and adolescence up until the point of marriage.

Hold Still clearly is a memoir as far as parts of Mann’s life are concerned. Between Robert Adams and, now, Sally Mann, it might be time to retire this idea. I don’t know this for a fact, but I have the feeling that Mann would scoff at the idea that as a photographer, you simply can’t write, an idea that, sadly, is being peddled way too ubiquitously. As those reading the book will find out, she also is an immensely gifted writer, which certainly is not a given at all when one deals with photographers. It’s rather safe to say that Sally Mann is one of the United States’ preeminent photographers. 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. 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.

Sally mann hold still a memoir with photographs