Author Q&A: Sally Mann

• Sally Mann will sign at 5 p.m. May 10, Off Square Books Oxford; 5 p.m. May 12, Lemuria Books, Jackson.

Award-winning photographer Sally Mann weaves words and pictures together to create “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs,” a unique configuration of personal history that reveals much about how her life has always been shaped by her past, and that of her husband.

Now living in her native Lexington, Virginia, Mann is one of the nation’s most renowned photographers, best known for her expressive photos of her children growing up on their rural Virginia farm, her Southern landscapes, and her sensitive examination of mortality.

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Named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time Magazine in 2001, Mann admittedly continues to evolve as both a photographer and a writer, with more than eight books now to her credit, including “At Twelve” (1988), “Immediate Family” (1992), “Still Time” (1994), “What Remains” (2003), “Deep South” (2005), “Proud Flesh” (2009), and “The Flesh and the Spirit” (2010).

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In 2011, she served as speaker for Harvard University’s prestigious William E. Massey Sr. Lecture in the History of American Civilization with a series titled, “If Memory Serves.”

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Her bestselling memoir, “Hold Still,” published by Little Brown, was named a finalist for the National Book Award, and it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York, where she has a show opening in September.

Through the years, your reputation as a writer has probably become as notable as your work as a photographer, but not many photographers write memoirs. Why did you decide to write “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs”?

After finishing the Massey Lectures (at Harvard University in the History of American Civilization program in 2011), I felt I needed to keep going with the project — it had taken an entire year to write and illustrate the three one-hour lectures, and I had worked so hard on them, I simply didn’t want to quit. All of Part Four (of “Hold Still”), the story of my father and his family and my early photography, etc., hadn’t been written but was latent and very necessary to research and resolve. It took four more years to pull the book together.

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“Hold Still” includes many family photographs and is a well-researched, contemplative look at not only your childhood and your life as a wife and mother, but an examination of your roots and your husband Larry’s, going back several generations. Why was it important to you to include a glance at your family heritage? 

It’s more than a glance, it’s a real excavation. I didn’t delve into family history thinking that nature necessarily trumped nurture, so I wasn’t predisposed to find genetic tendencies, or see them when they really weren’t there. But, in fact there were genetic components found within my forebears that I recognized in myself and I was nonplussed, chagrined and occasionally pleased to make the acquaintance of these heretofore shadowy figures from my genetic past.

You speak about how you spent years writing in journals. Looking back at those journals, what have you learned about yourself? Do you still journal?

Is that a verb? If so, no, I don’t journal. Thank god. Looking back at the ones I have, perhaps mistakenly, preserved, I am appalled at the vacuity and ignorance within them. Over the decade or so during which I actively wrote thoughts and feelings — oh, spare me! — I was evolving and maturing, so I try, when forced to plow through them, to take my immaturity into consideration and cut myself some slack. But, all the same, they are cringe-inducing in the grimacing extreme.

You grew up as a very independent “wild child,” a tomboy with reserved parents who were intellectuals, progressives and, in your father’s case, artistically expressive in a somewhat morbid way. How did this mold your own artistic future? 

How, indeed? I think much of the book is preoccupied with this question and, again, it tacitly raises the nature/nurture question. I come down squarely in the milquetoast, non-contentious middle in that debate, believing that in my case, certainly, it was a little of both. Was I wild because temperamentally I was wild or because nobody ever tamed me? Nature or nurture? Did my parent’s reserve harm me in any way or was I, also, temperamentally a bit on the chilly side? Did I inherit their progressive, liberal attitudes or did they inculcate them in me?

And, artistically — this is the crux, isn’t it? My father’s passion, his lifelong obsession with art: was that passed on to me at conception? I think yes, and it was reinforced by watching and learning from him, and others, about the importance and primacy of art to our spiritual well-being.

Your background and your husband Larry’s were, for the most part, worlds apart. Besides horse riding, what drew you together?

Physical attraction. Plus the fact that he was very useful: he could fix anything, drive anything, build anything, and cook. My parents adored him; that helped, too. One time at dinner my father looked and Larry, then looked at me and said, “If I had to choose, I don’t know which one I’d take.” My father was right. It would have been a hard call.

You state in the memoir that you were not prepared for the controversy and outcry about the photos of your children in your 1992 book, “Immediate Family,” in which they were depicted in the nude in some shots. You state that you saw the images as being “not sexual, but sensuously beautiful.” Tell me about that discovery and how you have dealt with it. 

What discovery?  The discovery that the world was a prudish and puritanical place? Or the discovery that I might have to defend my work, a position I didn’t believe is required of an artist?

I suppose I have dealt with both things in roughly the same way, with, as (James) Joyce said: “Silence, Exile, Cunning.” At the time of the so-called “controversy” I barely spoke in response to my critics, and in “Hold Still” I tried to temper and truncate my discussion of those years, although reviewers seemed determined to focus on those few dozen pages.

Tell me about your artistic interest (if that’s the right phrase) in death and your images of decomposing bodies and other matters that create a “shock value” for many viewers. 

I don’t aim for “shock value” — although several of my fellow artists seem to be very deliberately doing so. If the images I take in service to a concept I am exploring — say, death for example — happen to be shocking to some people, so be it. I am not going to shy away from an image because it will shock someone and, conversely, I will not seek out such an image. I look to make work that says something, and says it beautifully.

Please explain the influence that “Gee-Gee” (Virginia Carter, your family’s housekeeper for nearly 50 years) had on your life, and how that spurred your examination of slavery and its effects on the South.  

A considerable section of the book is devoted to answering this question. Gee-Gee was an enormous influence on me and taught me that the existence of “unconditional love” was not a myth.  She also taught me to be kind, to be civilized, to be respectful to be brave, to work hard and to cook. What more does a young girl need?

You state that the secret to good art is photographing what you love. Please explain how that has played out in your career.

The work explains it better than any words I could conjure up.

Sally Mann will sign copies of "Hold Still” at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Off Square Books, Oxford; and 5 p.m. Thursday, Lemuria Books, Jackson.