What Remains (Hardcover, New)

Renowned for her candid portrayal of family life Immediate Family, her revealing study of girlhood At Twelve, and landscapes from the American South Mother Land and Deep South, internationally acclaimed photographer Sally Mann has produced a powerful new 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 by police. She photographs the scars left on her property after the 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 nineteenth-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.