I had a chance recently to watch “What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann,” a 2006 documentary directed by Steven Cantor. The film is largely a series of interviews with Sally Mann and her family about the work she has produced over the course of her lifetime.
The documentary got mostly favorable reviews on Netflix and Amazon, and I think it deserved those reviews. There are a lot of points woven together in this documentary and I had to watch it twice to appreciate them all. Most of the content is good for aspiring artists of any discipline. The first is the clear and implicit trust that Mann has with her subjects, primarily her family. She spoke of that trust and wondered allowed how far she can push it. That element of trust is something all photographers should appreciate. I was also impressed with how the themes of her work evolved from one subject to the next, usually over the course of several years. Sally Mann rose to fame in the early 1990s for her work known as “Immediate Family,” a series of intimate portraits of her young children Emmett, Virginia and Jessie. The images were stunning, perhaps too much so for southern sensibilities at the time. As Mann points out in the film, the images are striking because her children have “potent personalities,” which are clearly seen in the prints. While true, they never would have let that show if they did not already a deep trust of their mother. It comes back to trust between sitter and photographer. From her immediate family, Mann started photographing the landscape around her. From there, her fascination with the outside world included death, and she reflected on the death of her father, her beloved dog Eva, the suicide of an escaped and cornered convict, her husband and his illness, and ultimately about her own death. Her work about death touches upon something universal to all humans. She also discussed her family and the beloved land around her as “wellspring of inspiration” and “comfort in times of failure.” She clearly knows what she loves and draws from that to produce the work she has amassed over the course of her life. Her family, for example, encouraged her to persevere after a prominent New York gallery canceled a scheduled show of her work. The work was ultimately shown at the Corcoran gallery in Washington. Finally, she spoke about the pressure she faces to continue to produce good work after a successful series of images. Each successful photograph “ups the ante” for any following work, but the ultimate solution is to haul the camera out and continue producing more art. As I said, it’s definitely worth watching.