Swamp Bones, Deep South, an image from Sally’s “Deep South” series. Mann’s description of Virginia Carter (aka “Gee-Gee”) is beautifully wrought, frank and affecting. A living, breathing version of Scout Finch, Mann had a close and loving relationship with the family’s black housekeeper-in essence a surrogate for her coolly aloof mother. Raised in a kind of benign neglect, little Sally was left to run around jaybird-naked, her father’s pack of Boxer dogs her only playmates.
It used to be families like the Mungers-well-educated, enlightened and worldly, the kind of people who set more store by ideas and culture than material things-weren’t that uncommon, but sadly now they seem quite rare. His passions were art, travel and fast cars in which he indulged sparingly, but well, acquiring works by Kandinsky, Matisse, family friend Cy Twombly, and an Aston Martin. The grandson of the inventor of a vastly lucrative cotton-baling machine, Robert Munger turned his back on the Dallas society from whence he came to pursue a life as a country doctor. Mann’s character was forged in genteel Lexington, Virginia, and the rigorous environment of New England’s Putney School and Bennington College she was also hugely influenced by her disciplined and principled father whom she adored despite his emotional inaccessibility. You can tell she’s whip smart, full of artistic and personal integrity and very funny. As much as she reveals about herself in the actual narrative, the way she writes does a pretty neat trick of doing so as well. Her prose is at times ornate, embellished with erudite and unusual vocabulary but then, out of nowhere, Mann will throw in a curve ball of slang, or some homespun Southernism that blasts fresh air onto the page. Mann’s tone is both literary and conversational.
Writing, for Mann, preceded photography as an interest and it has remained a “twin passion” throughout her life. This explains somewhat Mann’s literary facility, but judging from the excerpts written as a teen included in the book, she had the aptitude all along.
Part journey of self-discovery, part family history, part window into an artist’s oeuvre, Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still is simply wonderful, sharing that same combination of hauntingly beautiful lyricism and truth that are the hallmarks of her photographs.įor most readers it will come as a revelation that this giant of the American visual art world also holds an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University.
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