That’s the story, and because it was coincidental to the lives of the people Mann writes about, that’s all she tells of the story.

Yes, her father was the one who examined former Vice President Alben Barkley when he collapsed while giving a speech, and declared Barkley dead. Famous people seem to appear unexpectedly, but not with fanfare and rarely with drama. She summarizes and, in some cases, details the lives of her family and herself. Her prose is not quite the equal of Solnit or Berger, but it comes close, and her visual art stands eloquently on its own. I feel like an idiot for not having read Sally Mann closely before. His silhouette goes cold.” The dead in Tennessee are not people anymore, at least not in photographs. Here I think of Goya, or, rather, a quote from Goya in a play John Berger helped write: “When somebody is dead, you can see it from two hundred yards away. Her series on the body farm, aka the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility, where donated corpses are laid out in the open air so that researchers can study how the body rots, is explicit, yet not as horrifying as might be imagined. A series on Civil War battlefields, though superficially safe and pleasing, carries with it an ominous undertone, as though, if you peered closely, there might be a dead soldier or two lying in the shadows. The blur and fuzz of her work, at times from glass plate negatives, developed by hand with volatile chemicals, seems to echo of the past. Her photographs are often redolent of mortality, overtly or covertly. Sally Mann’s photography has always had a tinge of death to it, a fixation she inherited from her father. Mann’s reminiscences, as well as chapters on her parents and earlier generations, are also linked by death. This opening is leading into one of my favorite books for this year, Hold Still: a memoir with photographs, by Sally Mann. I suppose that to write about life without writing about death would be dishonest do artists have the same necessity put on them?

The essays in The Faraway Nearby are linked through sadness, through the decline of Solnit’s mother from Alzheimer’s, and the huge pile of apricots that was an unexpected part of her inheritance.

With John Berger, she is one of the two living authors I idolize. Solnit’s mind is wide-ranging, finding not the quickest but the most interesting route to the conclusion of each essay, even if digressions to Iceland or Frankenstein are involved. Last year, one of my favorite books was Rebecca Solnit’s marvelous book of essays, The Faraway Nearby. Okay, another book review, so many books on art seem to be coming into my line of sight these days.

Hold Still by Sally Mann