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A review by jwetterau
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
5.0
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up enjoying this autobiography of sorts by Sally Mann. I was ignorant of who she was prior to reading (this was my book club's choice), and feel a bit bad that I hadn't studied her before. She has a fascinating history and perspective of her family, and her controversial photography. She did an excellent job of taking the reader through her background to how she began photographing her family in their everyday lives, and why she felt the controversy leveled against her was slightly presumptuous without understanding context.
Her photographs resonated with me, because they remind me so much of how my own mother photographed me at a young age - bath tub time, running around the yard in the sprinkler, jumping into the creek behind my grandmother's home. I think people got so caught up in the style of the photos - they missed her message which was: I raised my children on my family's farm, and wanted them to be seen exactly as they were in that moment. I particularly enjoyed the parts of the book where she introduced us to her ancestors, as if they were her old friends, and found it poignant the way she described her family's history with slavery, and how her perspective has been shaped from that.
I'll admit - at first the book reads a bit pretentious, however you grow to realize that while she did somewhat come from a privileged background, she was not only aware of it but owned it. I appreciated that she didn't try to pretend that she wasn't given opportunities not available to most.
Her photographs resonated with me, because they remind me so much of how my own mother photographed me at a young age - bath tub time, running around the yard in the sprinkler, jumping into the creek behind my grandmother's home. I think people got so caught up in the style of the photos - they missed her message which was: I raised my children on my family's farm, and wanted them to be seen exactly as they were in that moment. I particularly enjoyed the parts of the book where she introduced us to her ancestors, as if they were her old friends, and found it poignant the way she described her family's history with slavery, and how her perspective has been shaped from that.
I'll admit - at first the book reads a bit pretentious, however you grow to realize that while she did somewhat come from a privileged background, she was not only aware of it but owned it. I appreciated that she didn't try to pretend that she wasn't given opportunities not available to most.