The death series was to be shown in September 2003 in the Pace Gallery NYC but got cancelled 4 months prior to the show. Sally was left defeated and disappointed and lost self confidence.

6 months later, she was allowed to show her work at Corcoran Museum in Washington. 

What Remains...

Sally Mann approached this book very differently from all the others. She openly noted that she wasn’t going to be blind sighted to these death photos as was previously with the children’s photos. “It’s ok if people are mad”, she says. She was going to raise it intellectually, as a reflection. To her death is less scary or something to be feared with others, partly because of her husband’s disease and partly because of her dad as she watched him die and he approached it fearlessly. 

The show was to end on a positive note, by ending it with pictures of her grown children. To embrace the living, love life an uplift. 

‘[you are] not there after you die. Your body is just a carapace/ a shoe that holds the real you. When you die  all that’s left is the carapace. It’s meaningless’

- Sally Mann

Sally Mann is and has for a long time been fascinated by death. First occurring with the death of her dog, Eva. But then for her book ‘What Remains’ she wanted to photograph people because then it was more relevant to people in particular otherwise  the images wouldn’t have the same power to make people think or delve into the idea she was trying to bring across. The book includes photographs taken at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, the remains of Mann's dog Eva and some close-ups of her now grown children.

 Her death series was explored in 2 ways in particular: what happens to the landscape and the dead?

‘The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. Its job is to efface and renew itself. It’s the artist who by coming in or writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory because the land isn’t going to remember by itself but the artist will’.

8th December 2000

A convict escapes to Mann family farm. He shot himself after getting shot on the hip by the police and knew that'd he'd obviously go back to prison. Mann went to the place where the suicide happened, fascinated:

'... at the base of a hickory tree was a glistening pool of dark blood. I was tempted to touch its perfectly tensioned surface. Instead, as I stared, it shrank perceptibly ... as if the Earth had taken a delicate sip.'

 This changed her way of thinking and became a new project for her. ‘WHAT HAPPENS TO A LANDSCAPE AFTER MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DEATH HAPEN TO IT?”

from Deep South