The memory of mortality

A dense fog enshrouds Rockbridge County this morning, and Hogback Mountain is barely visible. But it’s typical for the Shenandoah Valley to experience dramatic changes in weather every few minutes, and today is no exception. By the time a visitor arrives at Sally Mann’s 423-acre farm, the fog has mostly lifted and the distinctive hump of Hogback is vividly limned in the bright sun. A few vagrant wisps waft through the dips and hollows of the farm, on which seven Arabian horses canter poetically in the pastures. It’s impossible not to notice that the vista -- its depth and sharply etched texture giving way to ethereal vapors at its edges -- is just like a Sally Mann photograph.

By now, Mann has indeed become something of a brand name in fine art photography. Most of that world’s critics and consumers can immediately recognize her signature style and themes. Mann has worked almost exclusively with 19th century view cameras, unwieldy contraptions with crude glass lenses and accordion-like hoods. The cameras, used by Mathew Brady and his team during the Civil War, produce poetic, haunting images of extraordinary clarity and breadth that suggest both immediacy and a time past.

Mann has shot almost exclusively in black-and-white, further blurring the line between past and present in her work. Her most famous series of photographs, “Immediate Family,” was essentially a collection of carefully conceived and composed Mann family pictures, many shot on this very farm, with the feeling of a lost bucolic era. “Mother Land,” a sequence of landscapes taken on the farm, and “Deep South,” similar studies shot in Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, share an elegiac mood while they fix a particular, contemporary moment in time.

Mann’s new show, at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, concerns itself with her abiding obsessions of mortality, memory and the landscape that has held her in its thrall for most of her 53 years. “What Remains” is divided into five discrete parts: studies of the tanned hide and skeletal remains of Mann’s dog, Eva, who died on Valentine’s Day 1999; photographs of decomposing corpses at a forensics study facility; a sequence at the Civil War battlefield of Antietam; photographs taken after an escaped fugitive shot himself in a copse of trees in her front yard; and a haunting series featuring her grown children, their spectral images floating like Victorian memento mori.

That last series sums up not only “What Remains,” ending it on a typically ambiguous note, but also Mann’s career, which was catapulted forward in 1992 with controversial portraits of those same children, often in poses that seemed to rehearse their -- and, obliquely, Mann’s own -- death. Not even the shocking corpse images should surprise people familiar with Mann, who has never been squeamish about confronting difficult material. Indeed, for many viewers the most shocking thing in the show might be the prosaic presence, amid Mann’s characteristically formidable black-and-white images, of a simple digital color snapshot.

Sparked by a corpse

Outside the steel-and-concrete house she and her husband, Larry, built five years ago, six greyhounds and a border collie happily howl and rush to inspect a visitor. Mann, a lithe, tan, compactly built woman wearing khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt, her long, gray-flecked hair pulled into a loose bun, joins them on the porch.

Her gray-green eyes squinting in the sun, she introduces each dog before leading the gaggle to the kitchen. While brewing tea, she coordinates an appointment with a horse vet, a visit from a trucking company transporting a load of glass negatives to the Corcoran, Larry’s schedule and the whereabouts of her three grown children. Emmett, 24, is working construction and helping on the farm this summer; Jessie, 22, is graduating from Washington and Lee University; Virginia, 19, enters her sophomore year at the University of Virginia in the fall.

Taking her tea into the living room, Mann sits on a small couch in front of huge windows that look out over the hills. Facing her is a gorgeous 30-by-40-inch black-and-white portrait of Eva, her beloved greyhound whose unexpected death sparked the “What Remains” project. When Mann first found her dog in a barn near the house, she admits, she engaged in “terrible, bad, silly behavior,” wailing inconsolably over the frozen corpse.

“My first instinct was to hold on to her,” she recalls. Almost immediately, “I switched from the sentimental to the purely intellectually curious: What really will happen to her?”

Mann gave in to both impulses. She asked a taxidermist to skin Eva, and she contacted the Smithsonian Institution to find out how best to inter the dog so her remains could later be excavated. She buried Eva in a metal cage that would allow even the smallest parts to be recovered several months later.

At that point, Mann says, she wasn’t thinking about photographs: “I was thinking about the earth.” She’d recently completed the “Mother Land” and “Deep South” shows, redolent of the South at its most genteel and mysteriously Gothic, but also at its most mournful. The projects, she says, prompted her to think “about the importance of the earth and the way the earth is just an accretion of the dead, that it is sculpted, almost, by death.”

Mann didn’t consider photographing Eva’s skeletal remains until she recovered the cage, and discovered “this really stellar, celestial arrangement of bones, sort of like a hieroglyphic language or something. Right then, I knew.”

Death always a muse

Mann has always had, in her children’s words, a “death thing,” most likely inherited in part from her father, Robert Munger, a physician legendary for a cheerfully morbid sense of humor. A picture of Munger that Mann took moments after his death in 1988 hangs casually on the wall of Mann’s darkroom. Her office is adorned with skeletons and skulls either found on the farm or given to her by friends.

At one point, Mann delightedly shares the fact that she has “the perfect palindromic birthday. My birthday is 5-1-51, so wouldn’t it be perfect if (I died) on 1-5-15? Which would give me 10 1/2years.” But surely, it’s suggested, she would want more time than that. Mann laughs. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m running out of ideas anyhow.”

Mann’s shooting studio holds two view cameras. Hanging on the wall is Eva’s black-and-white hide, looking much as it does in the opening image of the catalog for “What Remains.”

Here, Mann mixes the ether, collodion and silver nitrate into the emulsion that she pours onto 8-by-10-inch glass-plate negatives; she must expose the negatives while the emulsion is still wet, then rush it into the darkroom to develop. The process, from the 19th century, takes about five minutes.

Many images in “What Remains” are scratched or otherwise flawed, results, as Mann explains, of “accident, bad processing, poor chemical management, you name it.... I’m forever messing up. But when you mess up, you get great effects.”

And, as to the question of what remains, she says, “the answer was love.” She interrupts herself, looking for just the right words. “Actually, interestingly, the answer to that question was love, memory and loss,” she says. “A sense of loss remains, but the sense of loss is designed to be the catalyst for more intense appreciation of the here and now.”

Inspiring surroundings

After lunch Mann, an accomplished equestrian, meets the veterinarian in the horse barn to discuss her prized Arabian stallion. During this, an epic thunderstorm sweeps through the valley, washing away the haze and humidity. Afterward, Mann walks to the Maury River and the cabin her father built there in the early 1960s. Waist-high blades of fescue hold jewel-like raindrops in their feathery seed pods.

“God, this is gorgeous,” Mann exclaims to no one in particular. “Look at this grass! Someone should photograph this grass. Hmmm. Maybe today is a good day to start doing landscapes. At 7 tonight, when the light is just right.”

The cabin comes into view, a one-room building akin to a shrine for fans of “Immediate Family,” where Mann grew up.

When “Immediate Family” debuted in 1992, it created a minor maelstrom. Mann had photographed her children, often in poses suggesting violence (“Emmett’s Bloody Nose”), abuse (“Damaged Child”), incipient sexuality (“The New Mothers”) and even death (“The Terrible Picture”). When people found out that many of the photographs had been staged, she got in trouble for that.

“I think people’s memory of what happened is exaggerated,” she says of the controversy. “I mean, what did happen? Nothing. If you don’t play, they go away. And I just basically said, ‘I’m not answering the phone.’ ”

Mann’s also been working on portraits of Larry, who has muscular dystrophy. Very gradually, the muscles of his thighs and upper arms are atrophying, a process Mann documents with often-startling candor. Those images, as well as many nude shots of him, pose challenges.

“What’s more important: to take a good picture, or make sure he’s comfortable with it?” she asks. And although history is rife with men photographing their female muses, she says: “It’s just not as commonplace to have a woman photographing a man.... So I’m a little chary of the whole thing. I think it’ll be a long time before I release those pictures, just because you’ve got to think about what the public can take.”

Back at the house, various family members are wandering in. In the kitchen, Mann mixes gin and tonics and begins to slice brie onto homemade bread.

Outside the kitchen window, the sun begins its descent behind Hogback Mountain. The hills have begun to deepen in shadow. It’s 7 o’clock, and Sally Mann is looking out the window. The light is just right.