Hi everyone,
I can’t believe 2021 is almost over! I hope everybody’s is having a lovely weekend and that you enjoy today’s recommendation.
mariana
Why did I read this book?
My colleague (and, dare I say, friend) Ben, recommended this book to me during one of our chats. I had never heard of Sally Mann when he suggested this book, but somehow he knew I would like it. As it’s probably obvious by now, I enjoy inspirational autobiographies and memoirs and this one turned out to be quite special.
What is the book about?
A visual autobiography: Sally Mann is a famous American photographer and writer, who has a fascinating life and career. In her memoir, she shares her story, her trajectory as an artist, and her reflections on topics like art, race, and death. I found the book’s structure pretty interesting, as she cleverly curated her story in a way that allows the reader to understand the bidirectional influence between her life and her work.
A controversial artist: Sally Mann has spent the majority of her life on her farm near the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia; her unique surroundings have been an incredible source of inspiration. In the 1990s, Sally Mann’s work ‘Immediate Family’ sparked controversy because it featured her children roaming free and nude around the farm. She was heavily criticised for sacrificing her children's privacy to gain fame, and her role as a mother was widely questioned. In her book, Mann runs us through how this all felt for her and for her family. She also reflects on the consequences of those pictures and shares her point of view regarding the differences between photography and reality.
Reflections on art and the creative process: How do great artists become so? What makes an artist? Who makes an artist? Probably my favourite part of this book was reading about how Sally Mann became the artist she is, through the weight that she gives to the different elements that influenced her.
“Maybe you’ve made something mediocre—there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets—but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
Why should you read it?
If you’re a fan of Sally Man: If you’re already familiar with Sally Mann, I strongly recommend this book as it will put all her work into context, enriching your perspective on her photographs and art.
If you’re curious about the lives of photographers and artists: If you enjoy reading about the lives of artists, this book might be interesting for you. Besides getting really interesting reflections on art and photography, Mann’s reflection and criticism of other subjects like race, death, the South, result in an enriching and original read.
“All perception is selection, and all photographs—no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s intent— exclude aspects of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from the time’s continuum.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
Links to buy the book
Always try to support your local bookshop. If you’d like me to add any bookshops to the list, let me know. Thanks to those who keep sharing new bookshops with me.
UK
Spain
Mexico
Italy
US
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“Insecurity, for an artist, can ultimately be a gift, albeit an excruciating one.”
“I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by the experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.”
“...photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.”
“Each of us leaves evidence on the earth that in various ways bears our form, but when I gently press my hand into the rabbit’s downy, rounded meuse it makes me wonder: will all the marks I have left on the world someday be tied up in a box?”
“As one might imagine, Khalifa taught me the only thing I ever needed to know about riding, and perhaps about life: to stay balanced.”
“...when I compare the lives of children today, monitored, protected, medicated, and overscheduled, to my own unsupervised, dirty, boring childhood, I believe I had the better deal.”
“There is nothing better than the thrill of holding a great negative, wet with the fixer, up to the light. And, here’s the important thing: it doesn’t even have to be a great negative. You get the same thrill with any negative; with art, as someone once said, most of what you have to do is show up. The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.”
“Maybe you’ve made something mediocre—there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets—but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.”
“Images can have consequences.”
“Like most southern white children of a certain economic and social class, we were both reared by black women whom we adored.”
“Pain is a dimension of old civilizations. The South has it. The rest of the United States does not.”
“Clichés tell us that fame is a prize that burns the winner. The clichés are often right.”
“...reputation is something that people with character can do without.”
“I don’t know if I’m all that different from other people, but for me great artistic leaps forward are not accompanied by thunderclaps or recognition. In truth, they aren’t even usually great leaps. They are tentative toe testings accompanied by an ever-present whisper of doubt.”
“Maybe this could be an escape from the manifold terrors of child rearing, an apotropaic protection: stare them straight in the face but at a remove—on paper, in a photograph.”
“And these pictures have come quickly, in a rush… like some urgent bodily demand. They have been obvious, they have been right there to be taken, almost like celestial gifts.”
“I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.”
“Those people who are unafraid to show themselves to the camera disarm me with the purity and innocence of their openness.”
“To be able to take my pictures I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both warm ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.”
“All perception is selection, and all photographs—no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s intent— exclude aspects of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from the time’s continuum.”
“If we only revere works made by those with whom we’d happily have our granny share a train compartment, we will have a paucity of art.”
“Part of the artist’s job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional.”
“Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the man in it. But as much as I argued this same point on my side of the pond, other voices still insisted that, as a mother, the rules were different.”
“In the pictures of my children I celebrated the maternal passion their bodies inspired in me—how could I not?”
“This postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way. And we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives.”
“In an immigrant society like this one, we are often divided from our forebears less by distance than by language, generations before us having thought, sung, made love, and argued in dialects unknown to us now.”
“...so we can only hope that the evocative Welsh word hiraeth will somehow be preserved. It means “distance pain,” and I know all about it: a yearning for the lost places of our past, accompanied in extreme cases by tuneful lamentation. [...] This word is about the pain of loving a place.”
“What part of these lives, of this dolorous DNA; has made me who I am?”
“I believe my mother discovered, like that stoic Spartan youth with the gut-gnawing fox, that when we cloak the past, like the fox, it will injure us.”
“Often a beautiful landscape would surprise me there, ambushing me with the allure of its self-sufficiency.”
“Certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, are weirdly expansive, and I develop a hyperattuned visual awareness, like the aura-ringed optical field before a migraine. Radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric, insistent. Time slows down, becomes ecstatic.”
“To whatever extent it is possible to photograph air, I was going to try to do it, and to whatever extent photographs can reveal the dark mysteries of a haunted landscape, I set out to make them.”
“It was the same goal I had when I wrote, decades before:
Recover of the small truths; the upper fields,
the smells, sounds: the local.
This much is not sentimental;
... to recover and clarify the deposits,
their grace so fragile, so various.”
“...like Napoleon, I figured that luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents.”
“This reflects one side of the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private. Could the feelings exchanged between two individuals so hypocritically divided ever have been honest, untainted by guilt or resentment?”
“Gee-Gee sent the cringing hounds away and made sure I had what I needed: food, a story, or a bath.”
“And while our home may have been in some ways a replacement for her own, which was rent by racism and death, we did not take her for granted and we knew, even then, that her love was the real stuff that held our family together.”
“So, where did she get her shoes, ill-fitting though they were? Only now am I wondering about these things. What about those uniforms? Who bought them? My mother? Gee-Gee? And from where? Was washing and ironing the uniforms part of her noble washerwoman chores? When? At night, or on Sunday? And how did she get something as simple was her groceries? She had no car; she worked for us six days a week from eight in the morning until eight at night and her house was on top of grocery-less Diamond Hill.”
“What were any of us thinking? Why did we never ask the questions? That’s the mystery of it—our blindness and our silence.”
“It isn’t long before I have to take a breather, having reached the first significant plateau of doubt and lightweight despair. The voice of that despair suggests seductively to me that I should give it up, that I’m a phony, that I’ve made all the good pictures I’m ever going to, and I have nothing more worth saying.
The voice is easy to believe, and, as photographer and essayist (and my early mentor) Ted Orland has noted, it leaves me with only two choices: I can resume the slog and take more pictures, thereby risking further failure and despair, or I can guarantee failure and despair by not making more pictures. It’s essentially a decision between uncertainty and certainty and, curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.”
“Soon I encounter a new obstacle: the new work, so precarious, unformed, and tender, is being subverted by my old work, which was itself once precarious, unformed, and tender but with the passage of time has now taken on a dignified air of inevitability. The new work has none of that apparent effortlessness, the after-the-fact infallibility that the old work so confidently glories in. No, the new work is always intractable, breech-presented, mulishly stubborn, and near impossible to man-haul into existence.”
“How can they understand the paralyzing, dry-well fear I live with from one good picture to the impossible next? Who can know the agony of tamped-down hope between the shutter’s release and the image in the developer?”
“In its wake, it leaves the freshly exposed reminder that, however good that last image was, the next picture must be better. Each good new picture always holds despair within it, for it raises the ante for the ones that follow.”
“Artists go out of their way to reinforce the perception that good art is made by singular people, people with an exceptional gift. But I don’t believe I am that exceptional, so what is this that I’m making?”
“Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people.”
“These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept.”
“The Platonic doctrine of recollection asserts that we do not learn but rather, with time and penetrating inquiry, release the comprehensive knowledge that came bundled with us at birth.”
“I remember author Dorothy Allison saying once that if you don’t break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you have not gone far enough.”
I once read an interview with Richard Avedon in which he asserted that a photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and that what he does with that knowledge is as much a part of the picture as what he chose to wear that day. Avedon felt that his models had control over the results, that they were performing for the camera and implicated in what was taking place. Of course, he acknowledged that most of his models were professionals or public figures who knew exactly what the camera could do for them and to them. When pressed, he allowed that there were also those he called “the innocents, who have no idea what my agenda is, how or why or for what purpose I am photographing them and who are simply curious and at the same time generous with themselves.”
“We always do. Exploitation lies at the root of every great portrait, and all of us know it. Even the simplest picture of another person is ethically complex, and the ambitious photographer, no matter how sincere, is compromised right from the git-go.”
“Still, the fact remains that many, I daresay even most, good pictures of people come to one degree or another at the expense of the subject.”
“It’s a tricky moment: taking the picture is an invasive act, a one-sided exercise of power, the implications of which, when considered in historical perspective, are unsettling. Photography is always invasive, but these experiences are consensual and, in the best hours, transcendent.”
“But at a higher level, which portraiture at its best can achieve, the results can also be transformative expressions of love, affirmation, and hope. If transgression is at the very heart of the photographic portraiture, then the ideal outcome—beauty, communion, honesty, and empathy—mitigates the offense. Art can afford the kindest crucible of association, and within its ardent issue lies a grace that both transcends and tenders understanding.”
“I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him.”
“No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.”
“Catch a person in an awkward moment, in a pose or expression that none of his friends would recognize, and this one mendacious photograph may well outlive all corrective testimony; people will study it for clues to the subject’s character long after the death of the last person who could have told them how untrue it is.”
“Studying it, I resist the impulse to make assumptions based on a fraction of a second snatched from time, perhaps the same second that a slight gassy sensation troubled his lower bowel.”
“We are perennially reminded that art is prophetic… and that some of our best modern works of art are those in which the world or self-dissolution is represented.”
“Can the artist produce under any motivation other than insecurity? And is the end product, the tangible creation, made less valuable, less beautiful by the fact that it derives from a basic insecurity?
“As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe I can make me better at living, and better at loving, and just possibly, better at seeing.”
Important notes
For UK and US readers, Bookshop.org is a great option to support your local bookshop. You can read more about it here.
If you’re using Gmail and the newsletter keeps going to your Promotions tab, you can try the following:
Open Gmail on your computer or laptop (it doesn’t work on mobile phones), and then drag the email from the Promotions tab into the Primary tab.
Add mariachi@substack.com to your contact list