
Fierce Attachments
WHAT MAKES A PERSON HERSELF? And what, if that person is an artist, makes her the particular artist that she has become? These questions are surely essential and also, on some level, unanswerable. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask them. Sally Mann—whose fierce and glorious images have made her among the most acclaimed photographers of our time—was prompted to consider them by an invitation to give the Massey Lectures at Harvard University in 2011. The result is Hold Still, a memoir at once intimate and reserved.
Mann titles the prologue of her book “The Meuse,” which is neither a typo for