Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs is a 2015 memoir by American photographer Sally Mann. Most of the memoir was written between 2008 and 2011, as she prepared to give Harvard’s Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization. Mann probes her early intellectual and creative memories to articulate how she became a photographer, as well as how she developed her iconic themes and subjects. These included her children, innocence, mortality, race, and the unique textures of human experience in the American South. Hold Still merges Mann’s narrative meditation with her photographic artifacts. As a result, the work demonstrates how memory transcends media, yet can be revived or gestured toward with any of the artist’s choosing.

At the beginning of her memoir, Mann explains that her memories are older than she is; in other words, she inherited them from her forebears. She compares these memories to “detritus,” not because they are useless garbage, but because they cannot be fully restored or recovered from the flow of time. She perceives her identity as an artist as born out of, yet entangled in, these memories. A goal of the memoir is thus to deconstruct these memories into their functional parts, explaining how each part contributed to the whole.

In the distinctly southern gothic voice and vocabulary of an artist who has lived most of her life in the American South, Mann also talks about her experiences as an adult. After coming into the spotlight in the 1980s, the new publicity brought new challenges to her life. For example, she was scandalized as a child pornographer following her nude depictions of her young kids. Those who knew Mann personally or brought their philosophical or artistic sensibilities to her work found that description insufficient and vulgar. Her work intended to capture transcendental themes about the human subject, like innocence, affect, and physical form that had been present since ancient times. Mann was even stalked and threatened.



At different junctures in the memoir, Mann places images from different times in her life. These include childhood photos of her taken by various family members; her first print, which she developed as a teenager; and the work in her professional oeuvre. Some of the artifacts are not photos: Mann includes a disciplinary note from her principal, and a brief letter from her father. Some of the images are followed by very little discussion at all; some of them are riddled with context and footnotes.

Mann’s combination of visual and textual narrative demonstrates that she does not only think of herself as a photographer. In fact, many of her most formative experiences do not involve photography, some occurring even before she conceived of it as a medium she might work in. She first discovered photography while enrolled at the Putney School in Vermont. There, she began to sharpen her artistic sensibility. She credits much of her success to her teachers’ tolerance of experimentation and emphasis on the importance of finding new modes of expression and argument.

Art also afforded Mann new ways of thinking about her difficult childhood. The only girl among her four siblings, she and her brothers were almost neglected by their parents while growing up. Without strong parental figures, they turned to nature, exploring the woods surrounding their house in rural Virginia. Her main maternal model was the family’s black housekeeper, whom she loved as much as a biological mother. Her lack of discipline and direction as a child landed her in boarding school. From there, she went to Bennington College. Not long after starting school there, she met Larry Mann, who would become her husband six months later. The couple moved back to Virginia, having purchased Sally’s childhood farm.



The return to her roots inspired Mann to take the photos that later became her seminal work Immediate Family, which skyrocketed her to fame. The book was dually acclaimed and criticized: some people found the work beautiful and affirming of humanity, while others found it pornographic and shameful. Mann’s legacy is a complicated one, bound up in the beauty, as well as the fears and anxieties, of the late twentieth century. Moreover, the work interrogates memory, asking what memories we preserve from childhood, and why we yearn to return to these impactful places and times.