The forensic eye: the latest work from Sally Mann, shown recently at the Corcoran Gallery, uses mostly antique photographic methods to explore themes of memory, death and decay

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Eleanor Heartney

There are few real taboos left in American society. Over the years, Hollywood has managed to turn prostitution, cannibalism, Satanic worship and even incest into popular entertainment. And yet, there are still things that make us deeply uncomfortable. One of them is childhood sexuality; another is recognition of the physical reality of death.

The first taboo manifests itself in the periodic uproars over photographs that make more or less explicit reference to children's status as sexual beings. Photographer Jock Sturges discovered this to his dismay in 1990, when the F.B.I.'s child pornography unit raided his studio and confiscated photographs of adolescent boys and girls shot on nudist beaches in France and northern California. Following a 15-month investigation, a grand jury threw out the case and ordered Sturges's equipment and work returned. In 1999, Cynthia Stewart, a 48-year-old Ohio mother, was charged with "pandering" sexually oriented material when a commercial photodeveloper sent police some snapshots she had taken of her 8-year-old daughter in the bath. She finally settled for six months of counseling to avoid a two-year prison sentence. And it should not be forgotten that, along with explicit photographs of sadomasochistic sex, the images used as evidence against museum director Dennis Barrie when he was indicted for pandering pornography in connection with the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary. Art included two of young children baring their sexual organs.

Discomfort with images of death manifests itself in similar ways. In 2001, a young Cincinnati artist named Thomas Condon ran afoul of this taboo when he took photographs of dead bodies at the city morgue for an art project. Believing he had permission from the proper authorities, he placed small poetic objects next to the bodies for a series meant to celebrate the cycle of life. Though he intended to crop out all identifying details, the uncropped negatives were seized by the police and leaked to the press, setting off a media firestorm. After a highly publicized trial, Condon was convicted of gross abuse of a corpse and spent 12 months in jail.

The difficulties presented by both themes originate primarily in a kind of false innocence. They stem from a deeply rooted cultural reluctance to admit basic facts of human existence, namely that children are sexually inclined and that everyone dies. Some of the resistance to these ideas is religious--conservative Christian leaders decrying the licentiousness of liberal, secular society are often at the forefront against artists who "purvey pornography" and fail to show proper respect for the dead. But the resistance also seems to emanate from a particularly American confidence in human perfectibility. Corruption of body and mind are essentially unnatural, in this view, and a combination of social will and scientific knowledge promise to eliminate conditions that were once regarded as inevitable.

Over the course of her 25-year career, photographer Sally Mann has managed to challenge both of these taboos and emerge relatively unscathed. A 1992 series titled "Immediate Family" included photographs of her children running naked and apparently feral through the woods of her Virginia farm. The work ignited discussions about whether she was inviting sexual voyeurism and visual exploitation of her own children. But despite a number of nasty reviews and angry phone calls to a museum where the work was shown, "Immediate Family" never came close to engendering a court order.

Mann's most recent museum show, mounted last summer at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., faced our complicated attitudes toward death head-on. A meditation on mortality, "What Remains" included a section of photographs of bloated and decaying bodies left outdoors for the purposes of forensic study. Despite a bit of nervousness on the part of the museum, some difficulty in finding other institutions willing to host the show (the Corcoran is still hoping to tour it but doesn't have any venues signed up yet) and a very unsympathetic review in the New York Times, there was surprisingly little brouhaha. In fact, most of the Washington area reviews were quite positive. In an interview conducted for this article, Mann spoke about the response closer to home, noting that, contrary to stereotypes about conservative tendencies in the Southern countryside, her local audience has often been surprisingly receptive and nonjudgmental about her projects. She attributes this, at least in part, to a rural acceptance of natural processes of birth, reproduction, death and decay.

"What Remains" is a five-part project that Mann describes as a narrative divided by naturally occurring events. The title comes from Ezra Pound's "Canto 81": "What thou lovest well remains,/ the rest is dross/ What thou lov'st well shall not be/ reft from thee." Mann's series began in 1999 with the death of her beloved greyhound Eva. Unwilling to simply bury and forget Eva, the photographer skinned her, placed both skin and carcass above ground in a metal cage for a year, and then retrieved the skin, bones and bits of hardened fat. Mann brought the remains to her studio, where she rearranged dirt, encrusted bones and dried flesh, and photographed them using a 19th-century photographic process known as wet-collodion printing. This technique, which is the same one used for the Civil War photographs made by the Mathew Brady studio, involves coating a glass plate with a mixture of gun cotton and ether, and bathing it in a silver solution. The plate is then inserted into an 8-by-l0-inch view camera. Since the exposure must be made while the plate is still wet, the photographer has only about five minutes in which to capture an image. Most of the works in the show were prints made from collodion negatives. Others were ambrotypes, a related antique method in which the original plate is backed with ruby glass or some other dark material that reverses the negative image.