The Hybrid Life Writing of Sally Mann: Capturing Human Nature in Words and Images

This chapter analyzes the memoir Hold Still, written by the American fine art photographer Sally Mann. The hybrid interplay of text and image in Hold Still (2015) makes it obvious that the book is written in dialogue with Mann’s famous—and much scandalized—photo-book Immediate Family (1992). By analyzing the two books together, the essay presents Mann’s work as an extraordinary example of life writing, in which descriptions and depictions of the artist’s own immediate family is infused with an awareness of the much broader family of man and of human life in general. This awareness in Mann’s work is linked to the tradition of dark romanticism and to gothic interpretations of life in the American South. But most importantly, the chapter argues that Hold Still and Immediate Family represent a rare kind of gynocentric life writing that captures the deep interconnectedness of humanity to the natural world we are all part of.