I concentrated on Sally Mann’s photographs for the first time a year or so ago when a publisher friend of mine sent me a copy of A Thousand Crossings. Before that I was only vaguely aware of her work and, when I thought of it at all, associated it with the controversy that flared up a few years ago about unsettling images she had taken of her children. I didn’t know she had written an autobiography until it showed up in a recent feature about must-read books.

Hold Still is a memoir of the passions that have driven and consumed Mann’s life. Her children and husband. Gee-Gee, the African American servant who raised her amid the benign indifference and occasional neglect of her natural parents. Photography, of course, and, perhaps the strongest inspiration of them all, the landscape of the American South, that realm of tragedy, conflict, melancholy, and sentimentality to which her life and her art are so deeply connected.

The best books about art lead you to the art itself, and that was certainly the case for me with Hold Still. It made me want to pore over those misty pictures of the fields, rivers, and skies of the American South that are the wellspring of Mann’s inspiration. It took me also to those challenging and provocative portraits of her family, taken with that same intense, unflinching eye.