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Photo-Text Topographics: Memory and Place in Sally Mann's Hold Still

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2020

CHRISTOPHER LLOYD*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire. Email: c.lloyd@herts.ac.uk.

Abstract

This article explores Sally Mann's memoir Hold Still (2015) as a complex photo-text that excavates, mediates and shapes memories, both of her family and of the US South more broadly. Theorizing photo-text topographics, the article argues that various landscapes (regional, memorative, aesthetic) are mediated by the interrelation between word and image. Mann's depictions of her children, southern location, and – most explicitly – black–white relations in the United States will be shown to reveal how the past can never be “held still.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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References

1 Mann, Sally, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), ix, xGoogle Scholar. All subsequent references are noted in-text.

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