Hold Still. A Memoir With Photographs - Hardcover

"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

"[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

"Hold Still [is] a glorious marriage of words and pictures, a courageous and visually ravishing memoir."--BookPage

"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)

"Intelligent, heartfelt, hilarious, disarming.... It flows like wine-fueled gossip."--Boston Globe

"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

"The twilit aura that makes Sally Mann's photographs so evocative comes through just as strongly in her writing."--USA Today

"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)

"Hold Still, multigenerational in its scope, southern in its humor, and Nabokovianin its ambition, is gorgeously written and convincing."--The Atlantic

"[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

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARThe New York Times, Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookPage
A revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.
In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her.
Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder."
In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.