Mann began to photograph when she was sixteen. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest in photography his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today. Mann was raised by an atheist and compassionate father who allowed Mann to be 'benignly neglected'. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Sally Mann HonFRPS (born Sally Turner Munger May 1, 1951) is an American photographer who has made large format black and white photographs-at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.īorn in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children.

Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, 2016.

Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society, 2012.

Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, 2006.

National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship: 1982, 1988, 1992.

Harrowing events are never far from the comforts of domesticity, as when her 7-year-old son, Emmett, is struck by a car while Mann watches helplessly.Įmmett recovers, but Mann's eventual response is to turn the near-tragedy into some of her most famous art, as she tries (and fails) to make a photo that mirrors the way her son looked when he was hit. Mann is that rare artist who can refract the chaos of social reality – and this includes the South's troubled relationship with the African-American experience – through a personal lens. Sifting through boxes of family memorabilia and artful evidence with Mann feels at once voyeuristic and perfectly right, for Mann is so open to life, so observant and determined to see through the surface of things that she persuades us to look deeper.Īnd Hold Still certainly goes deep. The result is something of a conversation with the artist, as she breaks her narrative with an invitation to 'take a look at this picture' and allows us to share a purely visual point of view.

They transform the book into a mixed-media feast that complements and clarifies Mann's thoughts, especially when she takes on the critics who would censor her Edenic nude photos of her children. Many are family snapshots, along with versions of some of her best-known images. If anything, her matter-of-fact embrace of life and its complexities is the Southern charm and soft breeze of this book, which interperses a trove of photography throughout the text. It's not even past.' But Mann is no morbid clone of her father.

Any such memoir is bound to evoke Faulkner's famed aphorism, 'The past is never dead.

Hold Still by Sally Mann