Sally Mann

Sally Mann’s multipart project “What Remains,” composed of several discrete series of photographs, explores mortality and the relationship between body and soul with the same mixture of unsettling bluntness and lyrical, almost Gothic beauty that characterized her earlier pictures of her children. At Karsten Greve, one of the series—”Last Measure,” twenty-seven black and white large-format pictures—is now on view. “Last Measure” focuses on Civil War battlefields, somber landscapes charged with deep historical meaning. Subtly balancing aesthetic and documentary considerations, the dark, shadowy pictures are dominated by trees and looming horizons. There are no people or signs of human civilization to be seen, but the photos seem haunted by their absence. Like most of Mann’s works, these are produced using the wet collodion technique, developed in the 1850s and seldom used today. The process leaves painterly streaks on the paper, deforming the images as memory distorts perception.