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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.”

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 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 

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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 .