Books |
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
By
Published: Sep 13, 2016
Category:
Art and Photography
GUEST BUTLER JANE CHAFIN has been an artist, writer and editor. She began her career as a painter and museum registrar in Los Angeles, then moved to New York in 1998 to become editorial director of CultureFinder, a cultural site. From 2008 to 2016, she was the founder and director of the Offramp Gallery in Los Angeles. She is now making digital art and writing a blog about art, books and culture.
There have always been two loves in my life, and while sometimes I favor one over the other, it’s never been clear to me which one I should commit to: art or writing. I have at various times been a painter/diarist; journalist/photographer; gallery director/blogger. This kind of schism can work — but rarely as remarkably as in renowned photographer Sally Mann’s recent book, “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs.”
In the prologue we find the author in the attic of her family home in rural Rockbridge County, Virginia, about to cut the twine on the first of many dusty cartons of family memorabilia:
I secretly hoped I’d find a payload of southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder. . . And I did: all of it and more.
What follows is Mann’s personal history from childhood through her life as a wife and mother of three, her development as an artist and emergence as a nationally recognized photographer; as well as histories of the extended family around her. The thread that runs deeply throughout “Hold Still” is Mann’s love of and reverence for place. The Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley, the family farm and the river that runs through it — these create the backdrop for her best-known photographs, those of her children. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Mann finds herself longing for home when she is sent away to school in Vermont:
Through it all, trying to sort out a whole new life, I ached for home. I missed the embrace of the gentle, ancient Blue Ridge and the easy sufferance of the gracious Shenandoah Valley. I missed Virginia, where sentimentality was not a character flaw, where the elegiac, mournful mood of the magnolia twilight quickened my poetry with a passion that, even read in the hot light of the next day, was forgiven, where the kindness of strangers was expected and not just a literary trope, where memory and romance were the coin of the realm.
We follow Mann through college, marriage and the birth of her children. We experience the excitement of her first proof sheet, her teacher’s praise and the excited letter she writes to her parents about it. We see her emerge as a critically acclaimed artist. And we experience her pain and frustration on being labeled “controversial” on the national stage because of the decidedly non-prurient nude photos of her children in her book, Immediate Family. We learn for the first time of a stalker who was “in love” with the children because of the photos and the toll it took on the entire family.
Mann analyzes a series of eight photographs that show the slow progression from idea to masterpiece: waiting day after day for the perfect light, hauling a huge 8×10 camera and heavy tripod over slippery rocks into the river, her son Emmet patiently posing in the cold river, until finally, on the eighth day she gets the shot.
We follow her as she roughs it through the deep south in her “mobile studio,” a Suburban fitted with a makeshift darkroom, stopping overnight in campgrounds or relying on the kindness of strangers for shelter.
The book is richly illustrated with Mann’s photography, family photos, letters and documents. The result is an ideal hybrid of illuminating, page-turning prose with a wealth of visuals — either of which could stand on its own.
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SALLY MANN/CY TWOMBLY: Mann and Twombly were both from Lexington, Virginia, and it was there that the photographer and the artist cemented their friendship. From September 22 to October 29 the Gagosian Gallery will exhibit her photographs of Twombly’s life in Virginia. The New York Times has a good piece on the friendship.
