Hold Still by Sally Mann review – a controversial artist's seductive memoir

The visual force of Sally Mann’s photographs of her three children – the collection called Immediate Family – is such that every article about her, even this review of her new memoir Hold Still, must begin with some mention of them. The photographs don’t stand alone; they come with a tailwind of controversy. They gleaned wider attention than art photographs typically got in the early 1990s, when Mann was the subject of a lot of bad press, and specifically a profile in the New York Times magazine that saw a journalist (now arts critic Richard Woodward) lift her life and work almost wholly from its context.

Presented through the lens of a dubious outsider, Mann came off as alternately imperious and oblivious to the potential objections some might have to her presentation of her children in the nude. As refracted by all of her bad press, actually, Mann became a figure of a favourite kind of modern controversy: a bad mother, one apparently willing to sacrifice the psychological wellbeing of her children on the altar of art (or, as many thought they had diagnosed it, selfishness).

The people who always come running when there is a stoning afoot turned up. They sent letters to the editor. Some went directly to the Mann family. One person at least harassed them for years. Mann seems to know that these people are mostly misled, but she saves her vitriol for those she feels should have known better. “How can a sentient person of the modern age,” she complains of one relatively lettered critic, the writer Anne Bernays, “mistake photography for reality?”

Now writing some 23 years later, the Mann of Hold Still presents another side of the artist entirely. The book insists on putting those images and that life in context, almost literally: though this is not a heavy, coffee-table art book, its text is laced with photographs. Some are archival, from Mann’s family, but others show the evolution of her art, including some of those images of the children.

When presented this way, through Mann’s seductive, cerebral, yet preternaturally calm written voice, the controversy seems shouted across a long void of history, though it wasn’t so very long ago. The age of ubiquitous self-disclosure, wrought by the internet, throws into sharp relief the fact that these pictures are, at the very least, clearly art.

In fact one feels bad about lingering so long and with such interest on the controversy, because Mann has many other things to tell us. Most of them are tied to the place in which she took them: a large farm her family owns near the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia. This is a place, Rockbridge County, that she depicts as both idyllic and self-deceiving from the get-go:

Not only is it abundant with the kind of obvious, everyday beauty that even a mewling babe can appreciate, but it also boasts the world-class drama of the Natural Bridge of Virginia, surveyed by George Washington and long vaunted (incorrectly, as it turned out) on local billboards as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

Among the subjects around which this self-deception occurs is, of course, race. For Mann, the chief experience presented came through what she describes as a truly loving relationship with her childhood caretaker, a middle-aged black woman named Virginia Carter whom Mann knew only as Gee-Gee. Though she insists on the sincerity of the relationship there is no small amount of self-awareness at work in Mann’s reflection on Gee-Gee’s role in her life: “How could I not have thought it strange,” she writes of family car trips through states where bathrooms and restaurants were segregated, “that Gee-Gee not only never ate anything but also never had to go, never even got out of the car?”

Mann’s wielding of this uncertainty never veers into either performative self-flagellation about “privilege” nor acts as self-forgiveness for ignoring what was really going on. Walking that tightrope is not easy but Mann manages it with aplomb.

But then another surprise of this volume is learning what a good critical mind Mann has. Not all artists possess, as she does, the ability to articulate her vision in clear language. Late in the book, telling of the process of photographing black men, she is blunt about the compromises her work makes: “Exploitation lies at the root of every great portrait, and all of us know it.”

Few photographers, especially those having been through what Mann had, would feel totally comfortable committing that idea to print no matter how true they themselves knew it was.