7/25/2019 Show and Tell. Sally Mann
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/show-and-tell-sally-mann 1/3
If you know who Sally Mann is, it ’s most likely because
you know her stunning, sensual photography. And if you
know Mann’s photography, it ’s most likely because of her
controversial pictures of her family. But there’s another
side of Mann that you won’t see until May, when Little,
Brown publishes her memoir, Hold Still. The book reveals Mann
to be a writer whose authorial voice is justas telling, daring, and
riveting as her photography.
For over three decades, Mann chronicled her fascination with
the Southern landscape and her WASP heritage, in photographs
that made her famous and that hang on museum walls. The
pictures of her three children and their high-spirited life frolick
ing, sometimes naked, on the family’s farm in Virginia were the
subject of a Neu> York Times magazine cover story publishedin the 1990s. The photographs also made her infamous. Her
memoir—a Southern Gothic rendering of a life, almost 500
pages long— tackles the big themes: love, family, race, gender,
geography, art, and death and reveals what it ’s like to be a South
erner, a woman, an artist, an outlier.
Mann didn’t start out to write a memoir; she says she doesn’t
even like the genre: “I think they [memoirs] are sadistic on some
level. I didn’t want the book to be a memoir, but Michael [Sand,
Mann’s editor] said, ‘That’s the shelf it’s going to be on, so just
deal with it.’”
The book grew out of the prestigious Massey Lectures, a series
of autobiographical talks that Mann delivered at Harvard on her
60th birthday. Writing daily over the next four years, she turned
the lectures into a book and herself into a first-time author at 64. I
When asked whether she thinks that one’s abilities as a writer §
decline with age, she says, “I guess it depends when you start— §
I had all those years reading other people’s great writings.”
For both the lectures and the book, Mann found her material “•
in the attic— in boxes filled with memorabilia and artifacts, not
just from her own unexamined past bu t also her mother’s, her
father’s, her husband’s, even her childhood nanny Gee Gee’s.
Pictures of report cards, horse-show ribbons, wedding announce
ments from the society pages, and even a letter from the school
board criticizing the teenage Mann’s wild driving are all pu b
lished throughout the book as they come up in the narrative.
There are also plenty of photographs, including pictures of her
ancestors and members of her family—some familiar from her pastwork and some previously unpublished. They are so critical to
the storytelling that the subtitle for the book is A Memoir with
Photographs.
Interestingly, the photographs are not sequestered in interior
album pages, as pictorial centerfolds of the subjects’ lives, but
instead they appear in tandem with the words. Seeing the
pictures this way increases the reader’s understanding, Mann
believes, though she acknowledges that publishers have their
reasons for keeping photos and text apart: “What makes it so
hard from a publisher’s point of view is that you have to have
bet ter paper if you’re going to show off the pictures. They put alittle segment of good paper in the center of the book, and the
rest is printed on uncoated paper.”
4 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ A P R I L 2 0 , 2 0 1 5
7/25/2019 Show and Tell. Sally Mann
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/show-and-tell-sally-mann 2/3
A u t h o r P r o f i l e
Mann feels so strongly about this issue that when she sold an
excerpt to Gagosian Gallery magazine, she objected to the editors
grouping the photos in pages preceding the story. “The whole
point is that these things relate to each other,” she says. “It’s very
important to have the words married with the pictures.” The
piece that the magazine chose focuses on Mann's friendship withGagosian artist Cy Twombly. Twombly, a modernist painter, was
born in Virginia and returned there after living in New York and
Rome.
Mann describes her Southern roots with affection in the book,
but she believes that those roots, more than her gender, kept her
from being recognized in the art world: “Staying in Virginia
made it really difficult for me to get any attention in the art
world. That was a real struggle.”
The South, on the other hand, is well known for its writers,
including such notable authors as Eudora Welty
and William Faulkner. Mann notes JonathanWilliams especially, an editor and publisher who
championed the Southern voice: “He lived down
there in North Carolina,” she says. “He was a
friend of Reynolds Price. There were very few
people in my life back then; of course, they’re all
in the book. They definitely gave me potent
inspiration, particularly Reynolds.”
For Mann, writing had always been her first
love. A poet in her youth and later a M.F. A. grad-
uate in l iterature (she earned her degree at Hollis
University), she faced a difficult choice in her
20s: “I chose photography over writing. I had tomake a living,” she says. To help support her
growing family, she photographed weddings and
babies, swim teams and school graduations. She made money but
not much. “The children were eligible for school lunches for years
and years,” she says.
What brought Mann to the attention of the general public was
the publication of The Family Pictures. Virulent critics accused
her of objectifying her children in salacious ways. The collateral
publicity changed her family’s life in ways that continue to affect
them: “I remember when The Family Pictures came out, people
would just knock on our door because they thought they knewus, and that , of course, is one of the great hazards.” Another, more
menacing, hazard was an obsessed stalker who continued to taunt
the family for years after.
Nonetheless, Mann stands by that series of photographs: “It
makes me sound like [I’m] being a bad mother, but I had no
problem with it. If there was something that I knew was going
to be a good picture, maybe there was a switch that clicked and
I just became a photographer.” Her children became her subjects,
not her children— with one exception, when she couldn’t even
think of picking up a camera. While accompanying her young
son, Emmett, to school, he was hit by a car and lay bleeding in
the street until an ambulance arrived. “I remember thinking,how can anyone take a picture of anyone like this?” she recalls.
“I could never be a photojournalist.”
Mann’s decision to write a book came, in par t, because she
finds that photographs lie; they “rob all of us of our memory.”
She says that “while at once they try to freeze the past, they in-
stead corrupt it.” Photographs, she says, create their own mem-
ories; they morph with every viewing. To establish the point, sheopens the memoir with a telling quotation from W.H. Auden:
“The steady eyes of the crow and the camera’s candid eye/ See as
honestly as they know how, but they lie.”
Mann says she found words much harder to produce than
pic tures: “The th in g that makes writing so di fficult is you
don’t have the element of serendipity. At least with a photo-
graph, you can set up the camera and something might happen.
You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good
picture if you just take enough of them. Words are just en-
tirely different. You have to carve them out of
rock, out of your soul.”
But Mann didn’t carve everything out of her
soul: “I left out parts of my life, and I was really
careful; I tried not to settle scores.” Before pub-
lication, she showed the manuscript to her two
brothers, her cousins, her children, even former
school friends— and took ou t parts or used
pseudonym s if they objected to the content.
“They have their own stories to tell,” she says.
Did the fallout from the family pictures make
Mann more cautious? Not likely. In fact, she is
considering a second family picture book. The
first, she says, was “really hard hitting and trulyaggressive, but the original body of work—and
there are hundreds of pictures—are a litt le softer,
a little more quotidian. You know, a litt le sweeter.”
And then there’s the project Mann has been working on for
close to three decades: “It’s a sort of unusual body of work, because
I don’t know many women photographers who have photo-
graphed their spouses or partners that way.” She admits the
intimate nature of the pictures intimidates her, adding,“If there
are any pictures I’d be scared to publish...” without finishing the
thought. Her husband, Larry, has already given his permission. “I
might wait unti l we’re both dead to release this work,” Mann says.
“He’s the city attorney for this little tiny town. Jus t imagine
Atticus Finch, pictures of him with his hardon everywhere.”
Mann may write more books, but first she has to promote the
memoir— a record of her life that is intimate, outrageous, frank,
and fearless. When her editor was trying to persuade her to put
the book in the memoir category— so “they know how to sell
it”— he told her that publishing a memoir is a little like having
a retrospective as an artist. “I don’t like that,” Mann says. “I don’t
like the finality— those should be done after you’re dead. I look
at these 35yearolds having retrospectives at the Whitney...
What the hell?” ■
Carrie Tuhy is a N ew York City w riter and wor ld explorer
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y . C O M 45
7/25/2019 Show and Tell. Sally Mann
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/show-and-tell-sally-mann 3/3
C o p y r i g h t o f P u b l i s h e r s W e e k l y i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f P W x y z L L C a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e
c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s
e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r
i n d i v i d u a l u s e .
Top Related