Reviews

• I've been a Sally Mann fan for decades and I was particularly touched by her writing in this book. I thought it was beautifully written and compelling. It was fascinating to read her motivations behind her picture taking and how her images evolved very naturally over time, given her personal history and sense of place. I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to get a better insight into the mind and photos of Sally Mann.

• An amazing story but thought it was a bigger book, so the photographs are rather small, so better the kindle version on an ipad where you can enlarge the photos. Still an incredible story to behold!

• This may be the best memoir I have ever read. I've followed Mann's photography for some time, from Immediate Family, through the southern landscapes, the commentaries on slavery, the studies of her husband's failing body, to the Body Farm work. What I didn't know was just how astonishingly eccentric her family actually is. Fully half of this book deals with her family: parents, grandparents, great grandparents, as well as her husband's family. Her family history rivals anything I've ever read before, from spellbinding tales of adverturers to criminals. Among her ancestors she has billionaires (in today's dollars), murderers, polyamourous relationships, drug dealers, inventors, artists, and writers. Branches of her family go back to Colonial America in 1630. She is a deeply Southern woman, bound to the land she comes from, yet conflicted by Confederate history. She writes that, like many affluent Southern children, she was essentially raised by a Black woman, who worked for her family for 50 years. In this book she tries to come to terms with the Southern mentality and the legacy of slavery, as well as her own parents' indifference towards child rearing. Recounting the bizarre stories would take me as long as it took to read the book. There are remarkable anecdotes on virtually every page of it, some of it almost unbelievable. Manhandling a dead body to the top of a hill to its repose at the Body Farm comes to mind, as does the recounting of her in-laws descent from high social standing to drug dealing and, finally, murder/suicide. Her own father's lifelong obsession with death, culminating in his suicide, seems to be a harbinger of Mann's own preoccupation with death and dead bodies. Her mother's lifelong distance and aloofness was offset by her relationship with the Black housekeeper. Sally Mann is one of the most interesting and creative personalities of the last century, in my opinion, stubbornly carrying out whatever odd and difficult project she conceives of. Her view of herself and her life is fierce, honest, and uncompromising. She never flinches from showing herself as she is, and never hides her failures and insecurities from us. This is more than a memoir of a photographer. In many ways, it is the story of the South. I've never understood this part of the Country until seeing inside of her mind through her memories, which she rigorously confirmed with her family, friends, and various documents she researched. It wasn't enough that she "remembered". She made sure that what she remembered was what really happened. Oddly enough, for an artist who has been called the preeminent photographer of her generation, her undergraduate and Masters degrees are in creative writing. Her book is brilliantly written. There is not a single dry sentence in it. Reading this book was one of the highlights of my reading year, and it will surely be one of yours.

• Wonderful book. Amazingly well written. Less poetic than her visual art. A more realistic and investigate approach to communicating her views. Great stories about Mann's ancestors, her immediate family and people she has met throughout her life. She brings up relevant questions about roots, place, aspects of how do we become who we become? Inspiring in many many ways. It evokes in me a longing for the South. I have lived in Ny and in California for 20 years and are now back in Europe, where the mystery is less and the human, racial, generational drama so different. She makes me want to travel the South and write about my own ancestry and mixing with my pictures taken through the last 40 years. Whatever this genre is called (?), it is a great one.

• This is a wonderfully written, intelligent and fascinating autobiography. Sally Mann has long been an inspiration for me as a photographer and I've admired her art since I first became acquainted with her work in the 90s. Of course I was excited when I found out that she'd published a book about her personal history, delving into the rich terrain of her development as one of America's most loved and debated photographers and her deep relationship to the southern landscape she's intimately known and loved all her life. What I didn't expect was to laugh so much and so hard. Ms. Mann has a true gift for storytelling and mining the details of the past, drawing the reader in while sharing her truths with a heartfelt lack of pretentiousness. It's not often that I encounter a book that I can't put down, and it's a real testimony to this book's greatness that I read it from cover to cover in just a few days, savoring each page as if I were in the company of a good friend.

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