Sally Mann: What Remains

Sally Mann - Self Portrait

For a portion of her What Remains book, Sally Mann ventured out to a Body Farm in which dead bodies are left out in specific environments to decay naturally outside. These bodies are put in different clothing, containers or are placed in various environmental locations, i.e. a bog or forest. Tracking the levels of decomposition, scientists can use this data to help in forensic and biological research.

Dividing the different series of photographs in Mann's book "What Remains", the text before the body farm sections is as follows:

"-when a human body
is drained of its broths and filled
again with formaldehyde and salts,
or unguents and aromatic oils, and pranked
up in its holiday best and laid out
in a satin-lined airtight stainless steel
coffin and stowed in a leakproof concrete vault-
I will know that if no fellow-creatures
can pry their way in to do the underdigging
and jiggling and earthing over and mating
and egg laying and birthing forth,
then the most that can come to pass
will be centuries-long whithering
down to a gowpen of dead dust, and not ever
the crawling of new life out of the old,
which is what we have for eternity on earth.

Galway Kinnell, "The Quick and The Dead"

All Images are from Sally Mann's "What Remains" Book