WHAT REMAINS

DOCUMENTARY OF SALLY MANN

WHAT REMAINS returns to follow the creation of Mann’s new seminal work: a photo series revolving around various aspects of death and decay. Never one to compromise, Sally Mann reflects on her own personal feelings toward death as she continues to examine the boundaries of contemporary photography. Shown at home on her family farm in Virginia, she is surrounded by her husband and now-grown children, and her willingness to reveal her artistic process as it unfolds allows the viewer to gain exclusive entrance to her world.

Mann has a gift for provoking strong reactions and her pictures of rotting corpses certainly do that. She took them at the University of Tennessee's anthropological facility at Knoxville, aka the "body farm", where human decomposition is studied scientifically. The bodies are mostly left in an outdoor setting and lie there for months or even years.

Mann called the series What Remains, her point being that death is not an end, that nature goes on doing its work long after the body has become a carapace.