![]() Central to this tension is Mann’s identity as a Southern artist deeply burdened by her forebears’ past with slavery. The thematic tension in Hold Still reflects Mann’s two life-long passions: the static romance of photography and the dynamism of the written word. Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past….As I held my childhood pictures in my hands…I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting. Here’s the shocker: Mann thinks photographs have the power to distort, or worse, supplant a person’s memory. ![]() ![]() This cover image of Mann brings to mind her gorgeous yet controversial black and white photographs of her children in Immediate Family-naked water sprites from a lost, ahistorical Eden. ![]() She seems suspended outside of time, as if she could be from any decade: her hair, white T-shirt, and preppy plaid shorts belong as much to the first decade of the 21st century as to the middle of the last century. The cover photograph of Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still, shows the author as a prepubescent tomboy, airborne against a gray expanse of sky. This review is by contributor Thuy Dinh, editor of Da Mau Magazine. ![]()
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