Mann is not just a visual artist but, it turns out, an earnest and energetic storyteller. If we throw out these images, what will be lost? In Mann’s mind, we lose only revisionist history, not “the truth.” Rather than preserve our past, “photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.” Mann’s acknowledgment of this tension in her work is one of the many satisfying elements of this memoir. She notes that rummaging through old photos, deciding which to keep and which to trash, is a delicate and emotional enterprise fraught with the misguided belief that visual representations of ourselves offer clues to who we are. Her excellent memoir, “Hold Still,” a careful, detailed literary and visual portrait of the photographer’s early influences and experiences, begins with Mann opening what she calls “ancestral boxes” filled with old photographs. Her subjects have included her young children depicted as wild things (“Immediate Family”), landscapes of her beloved Virginia (“Deep South”) and vivid, raw images of her own body and that of her husband’s (“Proud Flesh”). Photographer Sally Mann has built her career capturing the intimate details of the bodies, landscapes and objects that surround her.
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