What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (2005)
BBC, Cactus Tree

Description

Sally Mann's newest undertaking, the provocative photo series "What Remains," is a meditation on death that explores the way in which nature assimilates the body once life has left it, while directly confronting American attitudes towards dying. It includes: new photographs examining the scars left on her property after an armed fugitive was hunted down by the police and then shot himself; ominous landscapes from the Civil War battlefield of Antietam; a forensics study site showing the process of human decomposition; images of the bones and skin of a beloved, long since departed pet greyhound; and, in a closing, life-affirming gesture, close-up portraits of her children.

Tags

Photography

Collected reviews and ratings

9.3 DVD Verdict | Christopher Kulik

While What Remains is uneven at times, overall Cantor does an outstanding job of presenting Mann as an artist, woman, and mother with an original outlook on life and death.
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9.2 DVDCorner.net | Bob Ham

The strength of her photographic compositions, which have the depth of field and love of a landscape similar to Ansel Adams alongside the love of the imperfection of the photo process a la the Starn twins, are palpable, especially as we see her methodology through her steady gaze.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

The life and work and personality and emotions of Sally Mann are beautifully filmed and evoked, a must to understand her complex, rich, intense personality.
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8.0 New York Times | Ginia Bellafante

The beauty of the images remains no less overwhelming for anything the photographer says, but the pictures become provocative in an entirely different way — darkly true to what many currently understand parenthood to be, the irrepressible desire to manage and micromanage every transition a child faces. Ms. Mann is not merely watching, she is there in every frame.
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8.0 Los Angeles Times | Robert Lloyd

... it delivers what its subtitle promises, showing how the life gives context to the work and how the work, the urge to make the work, and the process of making the work order the life.
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6.0 Variety | John Anderson

... while "What Remains" might have worked as part of a series on artists, it contains so little objectivity on the celebrated photographer that it will remain consigned to television, and the likely fascination of blinkered Mann fans.
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5.0 DVD Talk | Chris Neilson

What Remains is so closely focused on Mann that it feels claustrophobic and unbalanced at times. Of the few figures outside of Mann's family shown, none are authoritative, and those few that are critical are excerpted in ways that undermine their legitimacy.
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