What Remains

Sally Mann:

After watching this Sally Mann documentary, “What Remains”, I find myself inspired to continue working on my own topics of choice, now with confidence to pursue tough topics and comfort from an older, wiser photographer and her convictions. Watching another artist talk about her life, inspirations, process, and issues acts as motivation to continue working to where one feels most drawn.
As Mann journeys through her inspirations, we see where she has gone, from start to finish. Starting photography at such a young age, she was able to work on her skills and develop a routine, finally reaching a stage where she was able to take her inspirations and move forward in life. With shaky nerves and fear of failure, it was comforting and reassuring to watch a well-known photographer start with class photos and local work and move further in her career. This is a real life example that photography can take you places, but you must trust the process. Success is not instant but takes time. We watched as she revealed the source of her artistic motivation, her father and current family, revealing things, whether spoken or not, that I have been struggling with exposing in my own art. Mann did not seem self-pitying or self-involved, but conscious of her emotions and their similarity to the past, present, and others around her.
What is most interesting to me concerning the documentary is the section in which she studies the decaying corpses. I, myself, would never be able to face death like that (at least not yet). Observing her close relationships with all of her subjects, dead and alive, Mann chooses to become apart of her landscape and models’ lives, moving in and around the subject matter and never wary of touching something that might make others uncomfortable. The method of her shooting is just as interesting to me as the way she handles her subjects. I have always worked with one type of camera, a 35 mm once owned by my mother. Mann offers visuals of a different style of camera, exposure length, and developing process, operating out of the back of her own van. It adds a new perspective on the act of photographing when learning of other possibilities such as this.
Overall, this documentary was absolutely stunning to me. We did not just hear her history, watch her progression into fame, and see where she is today, we were in her home, hearing her thoughts, watching her shoot, and talking with her family. Whether she said it aloud or not, we, the viewers, watched her discuss the tragedy of losing her father and how she works with that today. I would love nothing more than to see her most recent works involving death, as they seem more related to Sally Mann than the pictures of her children, moving beyond the awe inspiring visuals and into the awe inspiring thoughts of an artist moving through and working with her inspirations.

(side note: ps- Please bring Sally Mann here. She became such an important artist to me after watching this film and I would love nothing more than to get to watch her speak and study her art.)