Topic: "Hold Still" by Sally Mann

[hookstrapped]

I was staying at my father's last weekend and as usual, looked around to see what new books he had, and I ask about this Arbus biography I saw and he gives me "Hold Still" by Sally Mann and says, Read this.

This is her "memoir with photographs." It is wild and woolly and very eloquent, and an amazing ode to an all-consuming all-giving place for the artist, the South, and more specifically, her part of Virginia.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11649534/Hold-Still-by-Sally-Mann-review-breathtaking.html

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/12/405937803/making-art-out-of-bodies-sally-mann-reflects-on-life-and-photography

[astrobeck]

Sally Mann is a treasure!   

[Aksel]

What she said! Absolutly stunning and very inspiring.

[jharr]

This prompted an interesting discussion with my better half (who happens to be a much better/smarter artist than me) about the responsibility of an artist like Mann or Sturges who publish photos of nude women and children. Let me start by saying that my social views tend to be conservative. So I have gone through this process of thinking about art depicting the nude a number of times. I believe that Mann and Sturges took their photos with zero thought of malice or exploitation and the people in the photos were not afraid or ashamed or under any kind of coercion. In my mind, that clears them of any immorality in taking the photos. So how about publishing them? Certainly we are not so naive to think that everyone who picks up one of their books will have purely artistic appreciation in their mind. There will most certainly be people who see these young women as objects of lust. Now should that knowledge inform our artistic decisions? Are we 'inciting' others to have immoral thoughts? This was the crux of my dilemma. What I (with Laura's help) came around to was that an artist, and particularly these artists are responsible to create beauty. They cannot be responsible for the thoughts of their audience. The simple fact is that Jock Sturges could have released a book of photos of fence posts and someone out there would open it up and start having impure thoughts. Seriously. So I applaud the artists who can create beautiful images of the human form in a way that does no harm to the subject (in fact Sturges' stated goal is to make those people feel better about themselves). For those who exploit and demean and objectify people (especially children) for money or whatever other selfish reason, I'm thinking there is a very special place in hell for them.

[hookstrapped]

Well said.

Mann describes this period in the intelligent incisive way she talks about her father's (and her) fascination with death and any number of subjects, mostly pulled from a very colorful family history.  The thing about the photos of her kids that she gets across in the book is the fact that these were 1/30 second slices of time, surrounded by very different looking slices from her kids being kids. She makes the distinction that they are not her children (something assumed by all the people who drew meaning from the photos about the children's lives), they are photographs of her children. Interesting stuff to think about throughout the whole book.

[kentish cob]

Based, in part, on the recommendations herein, I ordered a copy, which duly arrived yesterday.

Being as I'm currently part way through two other books, I'm holding on until I can give Sally my complete attention, so it'll be a little while before I open "Hold still", but I'm already twitching...

As Becky says... the lady is a treasure.