But her musings on photography, of specific projects and the medium in general, resonate most strongly. The strange and surprising history of her ancestry adds an element of Southern Gothic to the book.

The book is an honest and thoughtful account of personal successes and failures, the making of her highly acclaimed bodies of work Immediate Family, Deep South, and What Remains, and the responses and controversies that followed. Each chapter moves fluidly between decades, a non-linear approach which accentuates the links between characters. She writes of her young marriage to her husband Larry and of her small farm in rural Virginia that is as much of a character in the book as any person. She writes of her grandparents and her friend Cy Twombly. She writes of her childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains, of her father, an eccentric country doctor, of Gee-Gee, the black woman who worked for the Mann family for fifty years and practically raised her. The story of Mann’s own life is interwoven with the stories of those who have shaped it.

Along the way she discovers scandal, deceit, industriousness, and desperation-and how all of these qualities have manifested themselves in her outlook on life and work. Sifting through her ancestry in the form of letters, photographs, report cards, and newspaper clippings (many of which are reproduced in the book) she shifts between her own history and that of her parents, in-laws, and ancestry. And like any true Southerner, Mann realizes that to understand herself, she first needed to understand where she came from. Hold Still casts a light on who Mann is a mother, a daughter, a wife, a photographer, a writer, and a Southerner. It is this kind of reclusiveness that has piqued the curiosity of fans and critics alike who believe that by viewing her photographs, they have gained a complete understanding of the person who made them. Shying away from the limelight, Mann lives a quiet life on her farm in Rockbridge County, Virginia where her husband “once irritatedley clocked five weeks” during which she didn’t so much as go to the grocery store.

In the years following her wildly successful (and controversial) series Immediate Family, Sally Mann has become something of an art world celebrity.

Hold still a memoir with photographs