The New York Times Book Review - Francine Prose
…[a] wonderfully weird and vivid memoir—generously illustrated with family snapshots, [Mann's] own and other people's photos, documents and letters…At moments Hold Still may remind you of certain friends and relatives who seem to have been born with a desire to push people's buttons and a penchant for being genuinely surprised, even upset, when this provokes a response. In life, such people are maddening, inspired, rarely dull and often a lot of fun, all of which can be said about Sally Mann's memoir.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
…weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful…Ms. Mann has got [a] gift for fine and offbeat declaration. She's also led a big Southern-bohemian life, rich with incident. Or maybe it only seems rich with incident because of an old maxim that still holds: Stories happen only to people who can tell them…The best quality of Hold Still—a book that strikes me as an instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last 50 years—is its ambient sense of an original, come-as-you-are life that has been well lived and well observed. It's a book that dials open the aperture on your own senses. Like the photographs she most admires, it is rooted in particulars yet has "some rudiment of the eternal in it."
From the Publisher
Sally Mann's Hold Still is just like her pictures: forthright, adventurous, loving, fearless, beautiful, intimate, and somehow uncanny. That means it's probably just like her."
—Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings
What I admire most about Sally Mann's new book is not her ability to write captivating sentences—she does. It's the honesty and fearlessness, the two mixed together, compelling her to own up to her mistakes, to acknowledge her winnings, to accept her losses (and those of her family). For this quality alone, Hold Still deserves a fixed place in the library of American memoir."
—Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost
author of The Place You Love Is Gone Melissa Holbrook Pierson
There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It’s also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.”
author of Bel Canto and This is the Story of a Hap Ann Patchett
In Hold Still, Sally Mann demonstrates a talent for storytelling that rivals her talent for photography. The book is riveting, ravishing — diving deep into family history to find the origins of art. I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
author of The Death of Santini and South of Broad Pat Conroy
Photographer Sally Mann's book Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South. Written in her pitch perfect prose style, it is a textbook of illumination and desire for anyone who hears the siren call of art beckoning to them. It's southern to the bone, hell on wheels. Hold Still is a masterpiece.
Amazon.com
A strikingly rich composition. Soaked in Southern history and heritage…[with] finely-crafted insight and honest revelation.”
New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett
The book is riveting, ravishing.”
author of The Place You Love is Gone Melissa Holbrook Pierson
There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.
musician Patti Smith
Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary. Fiercely beautiful.”
AudioFile
This audiobook, featuring Mann’s own performance, not only confronts and challenges—it does so in a wonderfully magnetic way. Mann’s near husky voice is comfortable and honest, with wide swaths of humor and a genuine charisma that makes one wish for more time with her…This is a fresh, illuminating experience. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
Telegraph (London)
She has produced the rarest of things, a picture so true it is breathtaking.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The vivid descriptive energy and arresting images in this impressive book will leave readers breathless.”
author of The Firm and Sycamore Row John Grisham
For three decades Sally Mann has captured images that are unique, haunting, beautiful, disturbing, stark - it would take a mid-sized thesaurus to hold all the adjectives that have been used to describe both the art and the artist. In Hold Still, she wraps her prose around her pictures, revealing a fine talent for writing and a rich family history.
actress Jamie Lee Curtis
This spectacular modern memoir reads like a sweeping gothic novel, filled with mystery, violence, controversy, and, of course, love in all its forms. It is a literary family album…A triumph.”
author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon Andrew Solomon
One would not need to know Sally Mann's remarkable work as a photographer to be swept up in her memoir Hold Still, which draws upon a family history so rife with jaw-dropping drama that it could provide the grist for a dozen novels. With prodigious intellect and a telling instinct for the exact detail that will reveal character or throw it into question, Mann delves into the treacherous territory of memory, mesmerized by the relentless dance of beauty and decay. In doing so, she manifests in prose the acuity of seeing that has propelled her to the top rank of contemporary artists.
Library Journal
Raw and darkly humorous, Mann’s writing is consistently honest and poignant…[from]one of the twentieth century’s most important figures.”
Associated Press
Hold Still explains not just her photographic technique but also her resolve to look head on at things most people would rather not see.”
San Francisco Chronicle
The voice is so clear and so crisp, so ready to admit error but also to stand up for itself…Rarely are our protagonists so gosh darned admirable.”
USA Today
The twilit aura that makes Sally Mann’s photographs so evocative comes through just as strongly in her writing.”
author of Hemingway’s Boat Paul Hendrickson
Hold Still deserves a fixed place in the library of American memoir.”
award-winning writer and critic Luc Sante
Sally Mann’s Hold Still is just like her pictures: forthright, adventurous, loving, fearless, beautiful, intimate, and somehow uncanny. That means it’s probably just like her.”
musician and National Book Award-winning author of Patti Smith
Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary. Fiercely beautiful. My kind of true adventure.
Kirkus Reviews
A journey of self-discovery begins in family archives…She effectively weaves a ‘tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend’ in this candid and engrossing memoir…Mann’s memoir is testimony to photography’s power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.”
New York Times
A cerebral and discursive book about the South and about family and about making art…An instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last fifty years.”
BookPage
This enthralling self-portrait…pieces together the secrets of her family’s wounded past and explores the inspirations for her groundbreaking work.”
Boston Globe
Intelligent, heartfelt, hilarious, disarming…It flows like wine-fueled gossip.”
Barnes&Noble.com
In this piercingly honest memoir, she…scrutinizes how our lives are revealed and not revealed through photographs and other documents.”
Time Reynolds Price
Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann's steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance, and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise - subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.
National Book Award–winning author Andrew Solomon
With prodigious intellect and a telling instinct for the exact detail that will reveal character or throw it into question, Mann delves into the treacherous territory of memory.”
New York Times bestselling author Pat Conroy
Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South…a masterpiece.”
|Los Angeles Times
Mann’s prose-luminous, chatty, and smart…invites readers to hold the camera still with her, and in that space, to imagine whole narratives that accompany these slices in time.”
Kirkus Reviews
2015-02-15
A journey of self-discovery begins in family archives.An invitation to deliver the prestigious Massey lectures at Harvard inspired photographer Mann (Sally Mann: Immediate Family, 2014, etc.) to embark on a search for her past, beginning with boxes stored in her family's attic. She hoped to find "a payload of southern gothic": juicy details of "deceit and scandal," including suicides, fortunes made and lost, and even a murder. Her sources did not disappoint her, and she effectively weaves a "tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend" in this candid and engrossing memoir. An incorrigible child, Mann loved to cavort naked on the Virginia farm where she grew up. Her mother, exasperated, turned over her care to Gee-Gee, the loving African-American woman who served as the family's housekeeper, cook, and nanny. Mann's rebellion continued throughout high school, where she discovered a passion for writing and photography that channeled her energies. "I existed in a welter of creativity," she recalls, "—sleepless, anxious, self-doubting, pressing for both perfection and impiety, like some ungodly cross between a hummingbird and a bulldozer." Married at 18, she continued her creative life at Bennington College and made photography her vocation. For the next several decades, she "virtually lived in the darkroom," dealing with "some end-of-tether frustrations" in printing her work. She was "blindsided," she writes, when she was accused of child abuse and exploitation after the publication of Immediate Family (1992), which included nude photographs of her children. Besides revealing portraits of her parents and Gee-Gee, Mann chronicles the sordid murder-suicide of her husband's parents; a deranged letter-writer later accused Mann and her husband of the crime. Although committed to photography as an art, Mann is troubled by the medium's "treacheries"—i.e., its power to displace real memories. Generously illustrated, Mann's memoir is testimony to photography's power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.
