What Remains

The New York Times

Mann, who is best known for the prelapsarian pictures of her three children in various stages of undress that she made in the late 80's, has taken a turn from innocence toward experience, and from youth to death. To give the pictures resonance, and to distance us somewhat from their disturbing content, Mann has hand-coated glass plates to use as her negatives, in the manner of 19th-century photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan. The results are often penumbral, dappled and pentimento-like, as if history were leaking through the emulsion itself. Lest this all sound too depressing, there is the book's final section, also titled ''What Remains,'' which consists of close-up portraits of Mann's children. These rheumy pictures, which entirely lack the staged quality of her earlier images of the children, suggest that life may be the ultimate -- if not only -- consolation for death. — Andy Grundberg

Publishers Weekly

Mann's previous collections, Immediate Family and At Twelve, recorded the bodies of children with a frank, slightly detached sensuality at a time when public hysteria around issues of child sexuality was sharply on the rise. The fact that many of the images were of her own children left Mann particularly vulnerable to charges of exploitation. But though controversial, what deflected such accusations was the serene flawlessness of Mann's pictorialist photographic technique, which somehow contained her very real provocation without necessarily resolving it. An even deeper sense of subtle disturbance pervades the four suites of photographs that make up this latest collection, whose subjects are mortality and death. In the two most graphic and difficult sequences, the remains of a beloved family dog and the corpses at a forensic lab are given equal emotional weight, equally luxuriant and pitiless memorialization. The difficult and time-consuming glass-plate process Mann employs, which results in an often dark, stressed and uneven surface, mirrors both the decay of the subjects and the movement of time that has claimed them. In another set, the almost invisible traces left by the death of a fugitive on Mann's property are recorded in washed-out images that convey with numb bleariness violence's psychic consequences. But in the book's most successful sequence-depicting the Civil War battlefield of Antietam-there are no literal traces of the dead at all, only an overwhelming psychic weight, which is reflected in intensely dark surfaces pocked with fissures and holes that at times resemble fields of stars laid over the barely visible hills, trees and fields. And if the last sequence, a series of extreme close-up portraits of Mann's (now grown) children, is less powerful by comparison, it provides the elegiac and loving coda to a book whose richness of presentation and sober subject matter work off of each other in varied and unexpected ways. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Mann states that she tries to capture "beauty tinged with sadness" in her photographs, an apt description for what she has often achieved in her career since the 1988 appearance of At Twelve and again in this volume of current work. Here, Mann creates dreamlike meditations on death, memory, and matter in five disconnected series of photos. She manipulates the surface emulsion using 19th-century collodion and ambrotype processes, creating work that appears to be undergoing the same process of decay that all life is bound to. Two of the image groupings-dusky close-ups of her own children and the disinterred remains of a beloved dog-represent dark continuations of the focus on familial relationships that made Mann famous. These sepia-fogged elaborations on flesh and blood are enhanced by their juxtaposition with three other, even more macabre sections: decaying bodies at a forensics study site, a crime scene near her bucolic Virginia farmhouse, and the Antietam battleground. Considering the more pastoral photographs in earlier projects, these images haunt like Poussin's famous allegory of death's constant presence, even in paradise: Et in Arcadia Ego. Mann has been called "the Faulkner of the lens," and two years ago Time dubbed her "America's best photographer." Photographs displaying the expressive facility as these will only solidify this reputation. A worthy addition to any collection.-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.