I really enjoyed this book. Sally Mann is, of course, best known for her wonderful photography, but this book confirms that she’s also an excellent writer (the book was after all a finalist for the National Book Award).

The book is subtitled: “A memoir with photographs” and it certainly contains a number of photographs: some by Ms. Mann herself and many from a treasure trove of family photographs found in boxes in her attic. It is these photographs that were the inspiration for the book.

A Los Angeles Times review entitled “Sally Mann’s memoir ‘Hold Still’ as lyrical as her photos” describes it as follows:

Photographer Sally Mann has built her career capturing the intimate details of the bodies, landscapes and objects that surround her. 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”). 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. 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.

I’d love to be able to write something like this, but I see a couple of obstacles. First, I don’t have the boxes of photographs and other memorabilia that she has. I have next to no photographs of my parents and grandparents and very few of myself as a child. While I have a lot of family photographs they mostly date from the late 1970s onwards. Second, I can’t write to save my life. So it’s not looking good for “Howard Dale. A memoir with photographs”.