It’s rather safe to say that Sally Mann is one of the United States’ preeminent photographers.

I’ve been trying to find out whether the more outweighs the less (I don’t think it does for me), and I’ve also been trying to find out whether that’s just based on my own expectations (it’s very possible). I feel compelled to preface this review with the above because I didn’t really think too much about any of it before reading the book, and I ended up feeling I got more than I probably subconsciously asked for, and less. Another part of your enjoyment will probably be determined by how closely you’d like the book to remain to what is probably going to get many, if not most people interested in the book in the first place, Mann’s photographs. Your enjoyment of the book will depend on how closely you will stick to the idea of memoir. “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.The subtitle of Sally Mann‘s Hold Still is given as A Memoir with Photographs, which it well might be, depending on how you flexible you want to be with the term “memoir.” I’d say that the book is in part that, a memoir, and in other parts, it’s clearly not. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. Comprised of 109 prints and several videos, A Thousand Crossings addresses complex issues relating to the American South and will travel internationally until the beginning of 2020. The National Gallery of Art presented a critically lauded show, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, in 2018. In 2016 Hold Still won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her bestselling memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. A 1994 documentary about her work, Blood Ties, was nominated for an Academy Award and the feature film, What Remains, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. In 2001 Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine. Her many books include At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), The Flesh and the Spirit (2010), Remembered Light (2016) and Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (2018). She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally.

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers.

Hold Still by Sally Mann