What Remains by Sally Mann (2003)

What happens when we go under? Not a cover nor disguise, not an act or performance, but the differentiated residence that emerges from that which lies beneath and within the whole body, its' entire frame, the complete structure that holds us.

Sally Mann's photography reveals to me one aspect of the underneath and within: dreams and memory... moreover, that dreams and memory are not solely a matter of the mind - but of the body entirely - made of and held by flesh, exposed sensitively at the orfices (eyes, nose, ears, wound), filled by blood and muscle and bone. Mann's work, paradoxically, presents less a final image or scan, as in an x-ray, than a real marriage between the object that helped produce it - her camera - & the artist's vision: in What Remains, a silvery gray, metallic penetration of nature; grand swathes of wilderness, and humanity; all fractured, all bruised, and subject to the technology that marks it, whether scraped, cut, blurred, ripped, or nicked, the aftermath of an accident that haunts while it cradles, whispering death is who we are.

There is nothing I feel that is contrived about the photographs shown in What Remains. A soft, light-filled rainbow over a human mammal devoid of life-giving breath, a double-boughed stream that appears by chance. A dark room smear, a mistaken lens wobble, enlivens the greyscape like developing sine waves of time. And though without colour, these are bright images, penetrated by warm light like piercing sun rays filtered or else they're soaked in shadow; a deep inky black. All of the photographs bleed: the body into the landscape, the mouth alone into a face into the eyes alone, the "faulty" machine into a graphic result, the sleight of hand softening... and nothing stands alone.

Sally Mann's photographs seem to claim not by extraction, but by sharing what is already inherent about the artistic process. The photographs are a final reclamation of her passing senses along with an otherworldly acknowledgement of her creative presence. It's all there to be seen, right on the page.