The farm, Virginia, Mann’s mother and beloved father, literature, her dear friend Cy Twombly, her nanny Gee-Gee, photography, her husband and children all swirl about place like a universe swinging around a black hole.

The book revolves around the farm Mann and her husband Larry purchased from her parents in the Virginia hills on the Maury River. 'Hold Still' is about photography and about life and family, which is often what photography is about, anyway. There are stories in “Hold Still” that would outdo tabloid journalism and things that would not be out of place in journals of the highest intellectual aspirations. Murder, infidelity, huge personal courage, kindness, tragedy and cleverness all play a big part in the story.

Staffer’s invitation led to Mann digging into her family history, opening string-wrapped boxes full of letters and photographs. A bit of a coup for a photographer, really, and it is a measure of Mann’s skills as a writer that she was asked. The impetus for “Hold Still” can be traced to an invitation by Harvard professor John Staffer to deliver a series of three lectures known as the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization. Mann is one of the finest art photographers working in America. “Hold Still, A Memoir With Photographs” was a best-seller and a National Book Award finalist. I just really like this book and I savored reading it. She has a special affinity for place, especially Southern places, from which she coaxes the rare “moments of visual revelation.” No slouch as a portraitist, Mann lets a terrific empathy shine through both her words and her pictures driven to find out what makes people who they are, she also reveals herself, and while you’ll find her a restless, inquiring, uncompromising woman, she claims only to be “a regular person doggedly making ordinary art.Review | I have curiously held off on reviewing this book. Mann is a riveting storyteller with a novelist’s sense of pacing, and the fine artist’s deft handling of image and tone. Her memoir is a rich collage of her own and her family’s photos, news clippings, report cards, suicide and other notes, artifacts that do more than merely illustrate her powerful narratives. Documenting life in crisp, haunting fractions of a second-the longest she can get it to Hold Still (Little, Brown, $32), Sally Mann has photographed everything from birth-a camera attended her second daughter’s delivery-to death, with her unflinching series of decomposing human remains at the University of Tennessee’s “body farm.” In between Mann has been busy with love and family, parenthood’s joys and fears, matters of race, art, horses, and dogs.

Hold Still by Sally Mann