Status Updates From Hold Still: A Memoir with P...

“…instead all that I remember is the rare, heart-pounding, brake-squealing lurch to the verge after glimpsing a potential image. My memories are of those euphoric moments of visual revelation, still fluorescing for me like threads in a tapestry in which most other colors have faded, leaving a few brightly, and sometimes wrongly, predominant...”

“Total strangers. The kindness of total strangers: the sweet gestures of blind trust and welcome, the common and miraculous somehow made one. It makes me weep. I weep for the great heart of the South, the flawed human heart.”

“know now.
As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it, and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures telling our brief story, but what will last, beyond all of it, is the place.”

“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.” WOW

About “Immediate Family,” “That's the way many of these pictures evolved, their genesis in a failed image but one that had some rudiment of the eternal in it-like the hair plastered across the ribs, or the V of sky and river with Emmett.
But others came completely spontaneously…” wow, the photographic process is amazing

“It’s warrior spirit… is a denial of the decision of 1865. The famous femininity of its women-not a myth… is a quality that comes from grandmothers who found a strength their men had lost, learnt to comfort, helped to forget, and never, never said the unsayable thing. Pain is a dimension of old civilizations. The South has it. The rest of the United States does not.” -British historian John Keegan

Oh, so I wasn’t exactly expecting a crazy murder suicide within the first 60 pages of a memoir but holy shit Sally Mann’s writing is laugh out loud funny

Wow, the woman that is Sally Mann