What Remains: Sally Mann's encounter with death and wet collodion

Afterimage, March-April, 2004 by Lisa Wright

"All things summon us to death. Nature, almost envious of the good she has given us, tells us often and gives us notice that she cannot for long allow us that scrap of matter she has lent ... She has need of it for other forms. She claims it back for other works." Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704)

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The above quote, nestled in the early pages of Sally Mann's newest book, What Remains, provides both the intent and tone of the images to come. Broken into four sections for a combined total of 79 images, the book is a meditation on mortality and the human condition. The sections progress from actual death and decay to the images of what still remains after death. Taken with a 100 year-old 8X10 camera with Mann's hand functioning as the shutter, and using the wet collodion process learnt with Mark Osterman, the images are quite classically Mann's, with deep blacks and dreamy light patterns. Mann, who has never been a stranger to controversial and difficult images, graphically delves into the emotions and biological processes that make up and constitute death and eventual decay.

Section one, entitled "Matter Lent" is broken down into two smaller sections, the first being concerned with the death of Mann's pet greyhound Eva, the second concerning the putrefaction and breakdown of the human body after death. Confronted with the grief of losing a favorite pet on Valentine's Day and the curiosity that followed to know what would become of its body through the process of decay. Mann decided to let the dog decompose and then reassembled what remained when it was removed from the earth. What remained was what Mann likened to a stick figure drawing of a sleeping dog with scant bits of hair clinging to its bones. Mann painstakingly collected the bones and brought them back to her studio where she meticulously reassembled the skeleton. The image collection of this process, as presented in the book, opens with a shot of the skin of the dog hanging from the nose on a peg in the wall. The images that follow are a mixture of close-ups of bone and hair, some indistinguishable for what they are, while others present themselves to be quite obvious. The second part of the first section is derived from Mann's fascination with the formation of a buffer between death and life in our culture, one that had not been present in previous generations. Mann worked from this fascination and photographed bodies that were in various states of decomposition on the grounds of a forensic study site. These 23 images making up the second part of the first section are perhaps the most disturbing ones to digest, as they are unflinching and incredibly graphic. While the images are unsettling and somewhat grotesque, the deep woods location make the corpses look almost natural and more in place than when pumped full of chemicals and dressed in Sunday best in the funeral home.

Section 2, "December 8, 2000", is the shortest section of the book and deals with an incident that occurred on Mann's rural property on the mentioned date. A convicted sex offender escaped from a nearby prison with two pistols and a shotgun and made his way onto Mann's land. When confronted by police, the young escapee shot himself in the head and died. The first image in this section is the only color image in the book and is a long shot across the property seen from the front porch, of police vehicles surrounding the woods. The remaining four images are of the area where the incident took place with scar-like police tape wrapped around trees, left behind as evidence of the bruising to the landscape. Unlike the first section, where the evidence of death and decay were completely unavoidable, December 8, 2000 takes the viewer away from the immediacy of death and places him as a spectator looking through the remains of the struggle for evidence of its happening.

Section 3, Antietam, is a collection of 14 images flanked by selections fromWalt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, taken in and around the site of the battle of Antietam, one of the bloodiest battles of the civil war. Of all the images in the book, these images most display the traits of the wet collodion process that Mann utilizes. The images are overexposed, broken and dusty like relics of a lost time. Through moody lighting conditions and overexposure, Mann creates an atmosphere of haunted longing that surrounds the place of great bloodshed. Though the people died more than a century ago, and have decayed, they have become part of the natural make up of the land and have returned to their natural state.

Section 4, "What Remains," are a series of 20 tightly-cropped facial close-ups of Mann's children in their youth and in present day. The images have a mask-like quality to them not unlike the death-masks used by earlier cultures; they are also reminders of post-mortem photography, a practice whose heydays date back to the nineteenth century. These "extreme" portraits are also images of one of the few tangible traces that Mann will leave behind after her death, the products and carriers of her genetic code.