What Remains

Sally Mann is one of America’s most lauded, articulate, and controversial art photographers. Her earlier exhibition of photographs of her family, denounced by the Christian right as pornographic, was the subject of Steve ( loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies) Cantor’s 1993 film Blood Ties. In response to her husband’s diagnosis with an incurable degenerative disease, Mann has now turned her attentions to the mortality of the flesh. Cantor visits the artist and her family at their Virginia farmhouse over a period of ten years, providing a painstaking background to the evolution of her work. From the remains of one of the family’s pet dogs to decaying corpses kept for forensic experimentation, Mann tries to understand the link between our sense of what it is to be human and the perishable stuff of which we are made. From Mann’s continuing commitment to wet-plate chemical photography to her problems finding a gallery in which to exhibit, this is one of the best records of what it is to be a working artist today.

I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me, my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.

Sally Mann