Hold Still is 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 ... She whips these stories to life, with a novelist’s relish and skill, shaking every bit of dust from them ... The best quality of Hold Still — a book that strikes me as an instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last 50 years — is its ambient sense of an original, come-as-you-are life that has been well lived and well observed ... Like the photographs she most admires, it is rooted in particulars yet has 'some rudiment of the eternal in it.'
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 ... 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.
The kind of photographer she is comes under just as strange and piercing a scrutiny in this exceptional chronicle. More than that, she confronts herself – motives and transgressions, loves and losses – with an intelligence that can be as distressing as it is impressive, all of it leavened by her pin-sharp wit ... The stories in this book are the stuff of novels, and Mann brings her photographer’s eye to the striking visual vignettes ... Mann is at her most eloquent when considering the Southern landscape and its 'flawed human heart.' Its 'vine hung dirt roads,' 'soft pulpy vowels' and 'death-inflected soil' weigh heavily in the book, as if she can’t quite resolve the love she feels for it with its great contradiction, 'the splendour of a lost world founded on a monstrous crime.'
Now her 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. Perhaps that should be unsurprising, given how deeply her psyche and her oeuvre seem to have been marked by the South, its live oaks dripping Spanish moss, its terrible record on race and its multigenerational dynasties hiding gothic Faulknerian secrets ... Young photographers seeking tips on how to have a big career should look elsewhere, though it’s striking that this is missing from a book that contains so much highly personal information. Perhaps one subject that remains taboo is female ambition.
Mann is not just a visual artist but, it turns out, an earnest and energetic storyteller. In prose that is as lyrical and surprising as her photographs, she offers a spirited account of her early formative experiences of horseback riding and rebellion in the Southern landscapes that deeply informed her childhood ... This direct and unapologetic engagement with race makes up one of the most powerful and interesting — and perhaps problematic — parts of the book and reflects the complicated and difficult history of the place that defines her ... Mann’s prose — luminous, chatty and smart — together with photographs that arrest and provoke — invites readers to hold the camera still with her, and in that space, to imagine whole narratives that accompany these slices in time, no matter how false or incomplete.
If Mann wants her book to be about something other than the controversy that has dogged her, she is still at pains to explain her motivations: the manner in which she involved her children in the creation and distribution of those images and their comprehension of the distinction between the art and their own bodies and lives ... Mann’s memoir, focused as it is on this place, tries to reckon with her own role within this charged historical nexus ... These remembrances could be their own genre for a generation of white Southerners, the cruel conventions that weren’t questioned, the casual disregard for dignity, what Mann sums up as 'our blindness and our silence.'
Mann has a wordy, headlong style that can feel breathlessly over-the-top one minute and as earthily matter-of-fact as pillow talk the next. Her book is divided into four parts, but it flows like wine-fueled gossip ... Mann is good at puncturing the bubbles she insouciantly blows, whether with passages of disarming openness, cool-headed judgment, or shocking melodrama ... the flair and personal flavor of her writing reminds us that 'issues,' in the op-ed sense, and art are usually at odds. And in the case of Mann’s best photographs, it’s the art that wins through.
In her photographs and her memoir, Hold Still, Mann presents a captivating version of that southern body in all its twisted beauty ... Mann’s words are often sumptuous, and her writing mirrors the visual and philosophical nature of her photographs ... At times her sentences brim over with rich language, becoming a bit saccharine, overindulgent. But these sins are easily forgiven; after all, overindulgence is a southern tendency ... Mann’s nearly five hundred-page memoir lacks a dull moment—partially due to the beauty of her language, and partially because of her striking photographs, and the ones she dug up from the family attic.
She admits several times in the book to being afraid at certain times—in specific situations. But what we come away with is an image of an extraordinarily bold, daring artist and surprisingly involving writer ... ...a look inside the workings of a fine artist who uses ancient analog processes to produce totally modern work. And it’s a family history like no other.
Never have I read a memoir—or a book purporting to be one—revealing so little of its author. Abjuring the memoir’s traditional structure of a life cycle, Mann instead opts for an idiosyncratic course delving deeply into the lives of her ancestors ... But rarely do these often painful revelations return to Mann herself ... The decision to write a book and call it a memoir suggests a tacit agreement to disclose at least some personal information: the trajectory of an artistic life.
Photographer Mann’s sensuous and searching memoir finds her pulling out family records from the attic, raising questions about the unexamined past and how photographs 'rob all of us of our memory,' and calling upon ancestry to explain the mysteries of her own character ... The vivid descriptive energy and arresting images in this impressive book will leave readers breathless.
...she effectively weaves a 'tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend' in this candid and engrossing memoir ... Generously illustrated, Mann’s memoir is testimony to photography’s power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.
