Photographer Sally Mann mines family history in memoir

Little, Brown and Company

$32, 448 pages

Sally Mann, the renowned American photographer known for her brooding portraits and ghostly landscapes, has written a memoir so full of family skeletons it practically rattles when you shake it. What’s more, she found them all in her attic.

Seeds for the book took root in 2008 when Harvard University asked Mann to deliver their Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization. She couldn’t believe they’d want her — “a photographer” — for such an honor.

Sure, she’d “acquired some acclaim and notoriety, as well as the irritating label ‘controversial’ in the early 1990s” with the publication of her third book, “Immediate Family”: Artfully staged, moody black-and-white shots of her three children, occasionally stark naked, hanging about their farm in Virginia.

But what would she say? “I didn’t think of myself as much of an intellectual,” she writes, “and I was certainly no academic. I wasn’t even a writer.”

Mann looked for inspiration close to home, “where I usually find it: in what William Carlos Williams called ‘the local.’” In this case, local was the dusty attic of her farmhouse, where “entire lives [were] crammed into boxes” filled with family letters, diaries, and yellowing photographs.

Hoping for “a payload of southern gothic,” Mann hit the mother lode. The memoir — which runs to nearly 500 pages — includes her discoveries of “deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse … clandestine affairs … suicides, hidden addictions… racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and … even bloody murder.” But despite everything from a pedophile stalker to an escaped convict on her doorstep — at times, it reads like true crime — Mann uses most of what she unearths to fuel a voyage of self-discovery.

“What part of these lives, of this dolorous DNA,” she asks, “has made me who I am?” Working through each box, she gradually compiles the history of her family’s wounds, while speaking openly, with insight and humor, about how these influences have shaped her drive, her work ethic, her romanticism, and the themes found in her photography.

“Hold Still” begins with a sweeping look at Mann’s “near-feral” childhood, her rebellious adolescence and college years, and a married life that began at 19. She moves forward a decade to examine hidden abuse and violence on her husband’s side, then backtracks to describe early influences on her work, especially her close friendship with painter Cy Twombly and her discovery of the glass negatives of Civil War photographer Michael Miley.

The pictures of Mann’s children changed everything, she says, “in ways that affect us still.” In a chapter that explains their evolution, Mann revisits the explosion of publicity surrounding the photographs and the deeper costs of her over-night notoriety — public outcry that labeled her a bad, even abusive mother, and the years of terror when a stalker caused her to fear for her children’s lives.

Mann says she knew little of her mother’s family until after her death. Of this “decidedly unsentimental” but beautiful woman, Mann writes, “hers was an absence rather than a presence.” Poring over letters, journals, and “oral history cassettes,” Mann finally locates the source of her mother’s icy reserve: A “strangely modern” parental ménage à quatre that left lasting emotional scars. But from that same line of “sentimental Welsh” forebears came a “near-umbilical attachment to a place” and Mann’s “plodding work ethic.”

In contrast, Mann’s portrait of her family’s African-American housekeeper, cook and nanny, known as Gee-Gee, describes a woman tasked with “raising a lonely child in a household that cared very little for children,” and the only adult on hand capable of offering that child unconditional love and acceptance. Says Mann, “the truth of all that I had not seen, had not known and had not asked” about Gee-Gee’s life during the Jim Crow era has driven much of her focus on the black experience in the South.

But it’s “the Daddy boxes” that make the biggest claim on Mann’s heart, if the exhaustively detailed history of her aloof and troubled father is any indication. Not only does her fascination with Civil War battlefields and the decomposing corpses of Tennessee’s “Body Farm” stem from his lifelong obsession with death, but the war between Dr. Munger’s artistic nature and his chosen role as country doctor may even account for his daughter’s vocation.

After finding photographs her father took as a young man, eerily similar to her own — shot with the same “travel-scarred Leica” he gave her when she was 17 — Mann looks back in wonder: “I began to see my artistic life as the inevitable result of my silent father’s clamorous influence.”

Along with lavish memorabilia in black and white, sepia and color — childhood snapshots, school photos, family pictures going back for generations, facsimiles of letters, newspaper articles, report cards, childhood drawings — “Hold Still” reproduces nearly a career’s worth of Mann’s own photographs. A wealth of examples, both failures and successes, reveal the evolution of her trademark style, especially the 19th-century wet-plate collodion process and its dark, fog-drenched, fly-specked patina, responsible for much of the haunting effect in her work.

“Ordinary art is what I am making,” writes Mann. “I am a regular person doggedly making ordinary art.” Don’t believe it. With its forensic eye, unwavering honesty and deeply intimate subject matter, “Hold Still” is the literary equivalent of Mann’s photography and every bit as exceptional.