Film Analysis: Sally Mann

What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann is a documentary about the motives behind the photographer's works. Sally, like any other photographer would experiment with her photography until one day, one of her daughters had been bit by a gnat and she had come to the conclusion that the photography style she had been searching to discover, was "right under her nose", and what better way to shoot the meanings of life than with your own children. She began to take pictures of her everyday life to share the beauties and conflicts of everyday life with others and turned it into something with deeper meaning.

All of her pictures appear in black and white and this is probably because she doesn't want any sort of color to add or take away emotion from the viewer when they look at her pictures. Black and white allows the viewer to  imagine things on their own and create their own story if they have a minimal number of distractions and effects in the picture.

Sally Mann pictured photography in her mind as something real, in everyday life and she portrayed this exactly. In her photography there is no dramatic lighting, intensity of color or need for touchups. Also for this reason, we would consider the photography "real" but in the documentary one of her daughters states that her mother was good at making something ordinary look extravagant, and for this reason we may also debate her photography to be fake.

Controversy arose when Mann began to shoot child pornography, which one can consider a "real" topic of today. It has become a problem and Mann only enjoy shooting the different and actual aspects of life that she encounters and for this reason, her photography is so believable and does its job: giving the viewer emotion to come up with a story of their own.