Sally Mann: What Remains

Known for her intimate and strikingly candid portrayal of family life (Immediate Family), a revealing study of girlhood (At Twelve), and two series of exquisite landscapes from the American South (Mother Land, Deep South), internationally acclaimed photographer Sally Mann has produced a powerful body of work on the one subject that affects us all. In What Remains, a five-part meditation on mortality, Mann focuses her lens on the ineffable divide between body and soul, the means by which life takes leave of this earth and the manner in which it rejoins it.

Mann's new photographs are by turns shocking and sublime. An armed fugitive is hunted down and dies on Mann's bucolic property in rural Virginia, and she photographs the scars left on the land by this chilling incident. A series of brooding, otherworldly landscapes made at the Civil War battlefield of Antietam is followed by a group of close-up portraits of Mann's own children, floating in the inky black atmosphere of the 19th Century ambrotype; another series taken at a forensics study site offers an unflinching look at the process of decomposition, as do images of a beloved pet greyhound—long since departed. Made with the collodion process, using glass plates, the resulting images are at once painterly, sculptural, and photographic.

Hardcover: 132 pages 
Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 11.5 x 1.1 inches 
Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds