Hold Still

 

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most memoirs suffer from name dropping, whining, and the humble brag. This memoir starts out with all these trademarks, but then it turns a corner and becomes intensely interesting and inspiring. From most enjoyable: 1) she tells how and why she embarks on some of the major photographic projects of her career--I especially enjoyed learning how hard she had to work to capture some images and others that were serendipity. 2) she waxes philosophical on photography--what pictures can and can't show us--interestingly, she posits that photos actually steal our memories 3) she elaborates about her ancestors and relatives who are immensely interesting with murders, affairs, drugs, wealth. She uses pictures to illustrate her words, which add an extra measure of interest and understanding. Very thought-provoking.

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photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories

When an animal, a rabbit, say, beds down in a protecting fencerow, the weight and warmth of his curled body leaves a mirroring mark upon the ground.  The grasses often appear to have been woven into a birdlike nest, and perhaps were indeed caught and pulled around by the delicate claws as he turned in a circle before subsiding into rest.  This soft bowl in the grasses, this body-formed evidence of hair, has a name, an obsolete but beautiful word: meuse. (Enticingly close to Muse, daughter of Memory, and source of inspiration).  

In fact, hardly anybody at Putney even had boyfriends and girlfriends.  I was suddenly living in another country where my currency was worthless, where all my hard-earned stock was downgraded.

Pain is a dimension of old civilizations.  The South has it.  The rest of the United States does not.  (John Keegan).

I realized the image inoculated me to a possible reality that I might not henceforth have to suffer.  Maybe this could be an escape from the manifold terrors of child rearing, an apotropaic protection: stare them straight in the face but at a remove--on paper, in a photograph. 

I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.

Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.

These are not my children with ice in their veins, these are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.

Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation not o the conventional. 

She kept the sorrows of there past hidden, like the stolen fox secreted beneath the cape of the Spartan youth in the Ancient Greek morality tale.  The young man, rather than reveal the dishonorable truth when waylaid by his elders, answers their questions with unblinking equanimity, all while squeezing the fox highly to him.  Finally the grown-ups are satisfied and allow him to pass, but by then the fox has torn the boy's abdomen to shreds.  I believe my mother discovered, like that stoic Spartan youth with the gut-gnawing fox, that when we cloak the past, like the fox, it will injure us.

The Platonic doctrine of recollection asserts that we do not learn but rather, with time and penetrating inquiry, release the comprehensive knowledge that came bundled with us at birth.

Richard Avedon...asserted that a photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed and that what he does with that knowledge is as much a part of the picture as what he chose to wear that day.

It would be an interesting exercise to determine if there's some threshold number of photographs that would guarantee, when studied together so that signature expressions were revealed and uncharacteristic gestures isolated, a reasonably accurate sense of how a person appeared to those who knew him.