Revisiting “Hold Still” by Sally Mann
I just finished the third reading of "Hold Still" by Sally Mann. Three readings are usually enough for some disappointment to the surface, for imperfections to raise their hands, but that was not the case. This book is not a simple autobiography or, as it mentions on the cover, "A memoir with Photographs"; this book is one more piece in the immense work of Sally Mann and, as such, she has constructed it with her customary thoroughness and honesty.
Sally tells us about her life in great detail, but the purpose is none other than for us to understand that each event, each encounter, and each look builds the floor on which we base our work, whatever we decide to be or whatever we want. Be unavoidable.
The story of his nanny Gee-Gee, the embarrassment of his in-laws, the mystery of his father, the "great" Larry Mann and his farm and his territory, which "is not only abundant, with the kind of obvious beauty, that of every day that even a baby can appreciate, but also features Virginia's world-class drama." Everything is pertinent, not because it accumulates in her DNA, as a journalist foolishly insisted in a recent interview, but because Sally's gaze makes it relevant, analyzes it, scrutinizes it, and integrates it.
Reading the book generates the same sensation as hearing her speak, especially in the documentary "What remains," we recognize the lucid artist she selects wisely and quickly discards. But what the book can show us, and that largely escapes orality, is the critical capacity that Sally has, highly critical, and the clarity of concepts. Not many artists like her possess the ability to articulate her ideas in clear language.
The book touches on fundamental themes of our human condition, such as death, love, beauty, and racism. In the latter, racism goes to the bone when she tells us in a chapter about her project to portray black men: "Exploitation is at the root of every great portrait, and we all know it. "
Not a single piece of straightforward advice, no list of shortcuts, what Sally offers us in this book is neither more nor less than a confession, I insist, a work in which we can see ourselves reflected or not, which can make us think, tremble, as in the chapter in which he describes how he took photographs at the University of Tennessee Anthropology Research Center; known as the body farm, a program that studies how human bodies, in the open air, decompose. "One thing about the defenseless dead struck me immediately: the need to fix them, to join their sagging lips, close their indiscreet legs […], cleanse their eyes of liquefaction."
Regardless of how aware we want to produce art or even be able to do so, Sally urges us to pay attention to the evidence of existence that we leave in our lives and how that evidence shapes us; that is where we must look again. Again, there is our life; if we want, there will be our art.