BuzzFlash Reviews
What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann, Photographer (DVD)
Zeitgeist Films
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
"What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann"
(Release Date 4/22/08)
As I watched Steven Cantor’s documentary of American photographer Sally Mann, "What Remains: The Life And Work of Sally Mann," I didn’t know what to expect, but I was immediately riveted. It was fascinating to watch a fifty-something year old woman artist at work using an old-fashioned box camera and plate glass negatives. We see the subjects of her photography, people and landscapes, and then we see these subjects transformed as haunting works of art in her photos.
Mann is extremely honest and articulate about her thought process and feelings and we get a lot of rare insights into what it’s like to be an artist as we watch her live her daily life and create her art on her Virginia farm. Even as Ms. Mann elucidates the creative process, it remains mysterious because of the beauty of her work. We occasionally see contradictions between what Ms. Mann says and what she reveals. To me it makes her portrait that much more compelling and human.
The photos, and stories connected with the photos, span her career of more than 3 decades. You learn about her three main series of photographs: At Twelve, her study of 12-year-old girls; Immediate Family, her study of her children; and What Remains, her study of the aftermath of death.
Of course, the documentary reveals much much more than Mann’s relationship with her work: her relationship with her husband with whom she’s been married for more than 30 years, and her relationships with her two daughters and son, the three of whom are at the heart of the controversy about her Immediate Family series because many of the photos of her children are nudes. We also meet Sally Mann’s mother and learn about her deceased father and her early upbringing and influences.
As a fifty-something year old mother with grown kids, this movie resonated with me on so many levels. I highly recommend it and think it would make a great Mother’s Day or birthday gift.
Reviewer: Terry Soto, BuzzFlash.com
“One of the most exquisitely intimate portraits of an artist’s process, but also of a marriage and a life.” –The New York Times
Product Description:
As one of the world's preeminent photographers, Sally Mann creates artwork that challenges viewers' values and moral attitudes. Described by Time magazine as "America's greatest photographer," she first came to international prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex and enigmatic pictures of her three children. What Remains--Mann's recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay--is the subject of this eponymously titled documentary.
Filmed at her Virginia farm, Mann is surrounded by her husband and now-grown children, and her willingness to reveal her artistic process allows the viewer to gain exclusive entrance to her world. Never one to compromise, she reflects on her own personal feelings about mortality as she continues to examine the boundaries of contemporary art. Spanning five years, What Remains contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann's work, and is a rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- New anamorphic master, enhanced for widescreen televisions
- Director Steven Cantor's 1994 Oscar-nominated documentary short Blood Ties, shot during the creation of Sally Mann's Immediate Family series
- Photos from Mann's Deep South, Immediate Family and What Remains series
- Eight deleted scenes
- Mann's lecture excerpts from a 2003 Copenhagen Photojournalism Conference
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
The Smithsonian Magazine writes of Mann:
In Sally Mann's farmhouse, in Lexington, Virginia, a photograph of her children dominates a room, much as they have dominated their mother's creative life for the past 20 years. The picture is notable for both the kids' innocent beauty and their knowing, defiant gazes, and it epitomizes Mann's work, which has been criticized for its frankness but mostly celebrated for its honesty. In 2001, Time magazine called her "America's best photographer."
Mann is a poet of the personal, from her haunting evocations of the Virginia countryside, to her intimate portraits of her children, to her latest project, a graphic elegy to her husband, who has muscular dystrophy. She grew up in rural Virginia as a "feral" child, she recalls, often running around outdoors without clothes. Her father, a physician, a civil rights supporter and, she lovingly says, an "oddball," gave her a camera when she was 17 and told her the only subjects worthy of art were love, death and whimsy. Sally Mann studied literature in college, and later attended photography workshops by Ansel Adams and George Tice, whose darkroom wizardry she embraced.
Mann's third book, Immediate Family, published in 1992 to coincide with a solo exhibition at a New York City gallery, won her wide notoriety. It features dozens of black-and-white photographs of her three children, typically playing (or playacting) in pastoral settings. Many are dreamy, expressing some of the fleeting charms particular to childhood, but others are almost surreal (her son's bloody nose, a daughter in a tutu next to a dead deer). "I'm a little like Flaubert, who when he looked at a young girl saw the skeleton underneath," says Mann, 54. "It's not morbid, it's just this awareness of the antithetical aspect of every situation."
The pictures of her half-clothed or naked children sparked outrage in some quarters. "Selling photographs of children naked for profit is immoral," the televangelist Pat Robertson told the filmmaker Steven Cantor, whose documentary about Mann is due to air on HBO this year. But others say such criticism is unwarranted, pointing out that Mann's photographs are not erotic and clearly reflect a mother's loving regard. In fact, prior to publishing and exhibiting the pictures, Mann says that she showed the images to an FBI agent and also introduced her kids to him, seeking assurance that the agency wouldn't pursue her on pornography charges; it did not. "My parents were eccentric, and when I had my own children, I didn't see any point in making them wear bathing suits when we swam in the river," Mann says. "There was no one within five miles of us."
Sally Mann discusses the complex challenges of photographing her children as they were growing up, which you view here.
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