Mann seems to credit her mother’s side of the family for not only her work ethic, but also her romanticism of the land, her love of place, and the land which she inhabits. She sums up this thinking with a quote from writer Adam Gopnik, “When we hit pay dirt, we often find quicksand beneath it.” The images from this time period brought her celebrity status and with it controversy, and that fame and contention added a creative temperance to her psych. Her likes, dislikes, successes, and failures are all there to see. In the chapter ‘Hold Still,” Mann goes through the process by which she photographed her children, from the mundane to the disturbing. She never writes directly about her creativity in this memoir, but it exudes from the pages like the oppressive humidity from one of her summer Virginia landscapes. Sally Mann photographed what she loved: her land, her husband, her children, herself but where does her creativity come from? In her new memoir Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (2015 Little, Brown, and Company) Mann gives us insights into this world by exploring her life, family, friends, death, and sense of place. “Unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.” Sally Mann
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