Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally.
Her many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh and the Spirit (2010). A feature film about her work, What Remains, debuted to critical acclaim in 2006. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.
"Hold Still, multigenerational in its scope, southern in its humor,
and Nabokovianin its ambition, is gorgeously written and
convincing."--The Atlantic
"Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary.
Fiercely beautiful. My kind of true adventure."--Patti Smith,
musician and National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids
"Hold Still [is] a glorious marriage of words and pictures, a
courageous and visually ravishing memoir."--BookPage
"Hold Still...[is a] weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful new
memoir.... A cerebral and discursive book about the South and about
family and about making art that has some of the probity of
Flannery O'Connor's nonfiction collection 'Mystery and Manners' yet
is spiked with the wildness and plain talk of Mary Karr's best
work.... An instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last 50
years."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"[An] extraordinary book.... plumbing family archives, Mann unfolds
tales of scandal, murder-suicide and racism, while the stunning
visuals reveal her evolving creative growth. The result is as fresh
and startling as a candid."--People
"[A] crackling, forthright exploration of her life and
career....The incisive writing and remarkable photos attest to
Mann's relentless habit of watching the world, waiting for 'that
incubating purity and grace that happens, sometimes, when all the
parts come together.'"--The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"[A] wonderfully weird and vivid memoir-generously illustrated with
family snapshots, her own and other people's photos, documents, and
letters-describes a life more dramatic than I had
imagined."--Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
"[Sally Mann's] prose examines Southern life as closely as her
camera lens examines the Southern landscape, and Hold Still
explains not just her photographic technique, but also her resolve
to look head-on at things most people would rather not
see."--Associated Press
"A boldly alive, bracingly honest, thoroughly engrossing,
sun-dappled, and deeply shadowed tale of inheritance and defiance,
creativity and remembrance by an audacious and tenacious American
photographer."--Booklist (starred review)
"A powerfully moving, meditative examination not just of an
artist's life and work but also of something much more permanent,
mysterious and complex: the South, both in close-up and from
afar.... She's a rarity: the ambidextrous artist."--The Richmond
Times-Dispatch
"A reckoning with the unreliability of both memory and photography
as ways of preserving the past.... The writing is so engaging and
her intellect so lively that the long ride seems almost too short.
This is clearly a book Mann needed to write, and her passion for
the task gives Hold Still much of the same exquisite power found in
her photography."--Go Knoxville
"A record of [Sally Mann's] life that is intimate, outrageous,
frank, and fearless. The vivid descriptive energy and arresting
images in this impressive book will leave readers
breathless."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A sprawling, drawl of a memoir, stretching narrative into imagery,
personal memories into historical research and creative reflection
into critical theory. Deftly and courageously written, it is
spacious enough to accommodate all the photographer's doubts (as an
artist) as well as her several certainties (as a mother)."--The
Houston Chronicle
"A stirring tale of a life in pictures.... A profound self-portrait
of an artist and her medium, and of the people and landscapes that
have fueled that art."--Garden and Gun
"A sweeping tale of Mann's coming of age, her family history, her
artistic influences and choices. It is also an homage to the
South...HOLD STILL is thought-provoking and is certainly arresting
to look at."--The Washington Post
"Captivating...Her writing is idiomatic...funny, defiant,
intellectually insightful, and candidly personal.... The best
autobiography published so far this year."--Kirkus Reviews
"Endlessly engaging and fascinating."--RVANews
"For all her accolades as a visual artist, it might surprise you to
know that Mann is also one hell of a writer. Hold Still is stark,
disturbing and beautiful."--Nashville Scene
"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."--John Grisham, author of The Firm and
Sycamore Row
"Generous, enlightening, thought-provoking, often dark but more
often funny enough to make you laugh out loud, Hold Still is a book
to hold on to for dear life, because this is one of those books
that if you loan it out, you'll never see it again."--The Daily
Beast
"If you only read one book this year, Hold Still by Sally Mann
should be it."--KMUW (NPR)
"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."--Ann Patchett, author of
Bel Canto and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
"Instant classic."--Vogue
"Intelligent, heartfelt, hilarious, disarming.... It flows like
wine-fueled gossip."--Boston Globe
"Mann cannot answer all the questions she asks herself and
sometimes doubts her purpose and her memories, but in holding still
in the fast-flowing stream, she has produced the rarest of things,
a picture so true it is breathtaking."--The Telegraph
"Mann's deeply personal and unflinchingly honest reflections on her
family, her photography, and her brushes with the harsh specter of
public condemnation make Hold Still not only an uncommonly
compelling memoir, but also an invaluable fond of
wisdom."--Bustle
"Mann's prose-luminous, chatty and smart-together with photographs
that arrest and provoke-invites readers to hold the camera still
with her, and in that space, to imagine whole narratives that
accompany these slices in time."--Los Angeles Times
"Mann's...memoir lacks a dull moment-partially due to the beauty of
her language, and partially because of her striking photographs,
and the ones she dug up from the family attic."--The Rumpus
"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."--Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree and The
Noonday Demon
"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."--Pat Conroy,
author of The Death of Santini and South of Broad
"Ravishing and disturbing... the memoir seems effortless, but it is
as artfully structured as her photographs, and as seductive. An
exhilarating, riveting book."--The Times Literary Supplement
"Read this book. If you want to be an artist, carry it around like
your Bible. If you strive to be a better mother or daughter, or a
more insightful human being, Hold Still needs to be with you at all
times.... As soon as I finished the last page and closed the cover,
I turned to page one and began reading it again. It is
remarkable."--BookReporter
"Richly compelling and evocative.... An unforgettable memoir. But
it's more than that.... The abiding and precious gift of this book
is precisely this: Mann's highly personal exploration of her
passion, and her perseverance."--Bookforum
"Sally Mann...has written an exquisite memoir...it is foremost a
literary achievement, showing Mann to be as ingenious with words as
she is with a camera."--Oprah.com
"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
"Startling.... A family history like no other."--New York Journal
of Books
"Sumptuous.... Mann writes insightfully about her ancestors, her
friends and her own work.... The tangled and arbitrary threads that
tether each of us to what matters in this world."--Toronto National
Post
"The twilit aura that makes Sally Mann's photographs so evocative
comes through just as strongly in her writing."--USA Today
"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."--San Francisco Chronicle
"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."--Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love is
Gone
"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 enlivened by many of
the images in the stories told. A Southern work, it is also
universally accessible, as all of Sally Mann's work is, for she
reaches deep into her ancestral headwaters and the twisted rivers
of human remembrance. A triumph."--Jamie Lee Curtis, actress
"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
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