Review of "Hold Still" by Sally Mann

I picked up this book, in its hardcover version, after my latest visit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. I had actually never heard of Sally Mann before, but I loved the large number of color and black-and-white photographs in the book (at least in the hardcover version, the reproductions were of high quality although they were integrated to the text instead of being on separate pages.) The book was very well written and it provided good insights into her life up to 2015 - her son committed suicide about a year later so that is not in the book - but, in spite of her friendship with fellow Lexington, Va. local Cy Twombly, the fact remains that she doesn't quite have the sort of life and career that would lend itself to a full-length memoir so she has to spend a lot of the book on her parents, photos included, and the black woman who raised her as a child. I actually liked a lot the part about her interactions, as a young white girl, with black folks, which was written with great sensitivity, and the part about her elderly father committing suicide. Regarding the controversy of the pictures of her naked young children, I felt she was a bit naive not to expect what happened, but if you live on a farm in a place like Lexington, Va, it is probably easy to forget there are weirdos out there. So, the book is well-done and the stunning pictures will certainly inspire many photographers, but I did skip some pages about her parents, especially before she was born. Hence, the rating of four starts out of five. Definitely worth a look/read.