Death's indelible impression: "… at the base of a hickory tree was a glistening pool of dark blood. I was tempted to touch its perfectly tensioned surface. Instead, as I stared, it shrank perceptibly … as if the Earth had taken a delicate sip."

"SALLY MANN: What Remains" is a five-part photographic series that explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, Earth and spirit. The project is organized into five sections that visually depict the eternal cycle of life, death, and regeneration. It draws upon the artist's personal experiences as inspiration for a haunting series about the one subject that affects us all: the loss of life.

Never one to shy away from challenging subject matter, Mann asks viewers to contemplate the beauty and efficiency with which nature assimilates the body once life is over. Here, she seamlessly connects the landscape of the Earth to the topography of the body and examines how both are tightly interwoven. Yet, she creates tension between the two. As the exhibition progresses, portrait faces of her children emerge from the darkness of the alchemical photographic process, surrounded by murky images of the landscape, as if struggling to become free of the Earth that inevitably reclaims the body.

The exhibition's five sections are as follows:

Matter Lent. Created with an antique 8 x 10-inch view camera, using the wet-plate collodion process, these images document the decomposition of Mann's beloved pet greyhound Eva in a manner that is at once painterly, sculptural, and photographic. When Eva died, Mann buried her body in the woods. She returned the following year and disinterred the remains. Her photographs of the dog's bones and fur are at once anthropological and abstract, sometimes evoking astronomical views of galaxies and stars, sometimes resembling pictorial records from an archeological dig.

Introduced in 1851, the wet-plate collodion process is a method of making photographic negatives on a glass plate coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The plate is covered with a silver nitrate solution, loaded in a plate holder into the camera, and exposed while still wet and sticky. The photographer only has about five minutes to make the picture before the solution dries. A number of these photographs are presented in the exhibition as ambrotypes. To produce these, Mann backed her original collodion negatives with ruby glass, creating modern versions of this traditional photographic process popular in the 1860s. When the negatives are backed with this dark, translucent material, the image is reversed and can be viewed as a rich, warm-toned positive photograph.

Untitled. Incorporating the most visually graphic photographs in the exhibition, this section includes images taken at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility, a study site where scientists, students, doctors, ,and law enforcement officers research the decomposition of human remains. In these varnished gelatin silver prints made from her original glass plate negatives, Mann does not avert her eyes from the reality of decay. "There's a moment where you look at a body and say, 'That was a human being.' That was someone who was loved, cherished, caressed. That's a very tough one for me, the whole question of when a human becomes remains. That question came up over and over again while I was doing this work."

December 8, 2000. "Because of a big bend in the river, our farm has water on three sides, a classic stronghold. This fact, coupled with the long views from our house, explains why at first we had no locks on the doors," explains Mann.

"When the sheriff called to suggest locking up against an escaped prisoner, I was briefly amused by the impossibility of this, then paralyzed by bogey-man-under-the-bed fear. The fear was appropriate: the prisoner, a felon with sex offenses on his record, had escaped custody with two pistols and a shotgun. When he reached the river below our house, he swam it, forcing his pursuers to backtrack by car to the nearest bridge. I was alone on the farm except for this wet, unhappy man with the guns.

"He must have ditched the shotgun because by the time he approached the house he only had the pistols," she continues. "Ducking behind a tree, he put one of them to his head. His shot was tinnily distinguishable from the rifle shots of the police who had appeared at the last moment. He fell among the stumps and bracken, just a kid after all, my son's age, bled out in the milky winter light.

"When it was over and the trucks and cars and helicopters had cleared out, I walked over to the place where he died. The underbrush was matted down; there were patches of blue and orange spray paint marking coordinates of some kind, yellow crime tape hung on the wild rose, and there at the base of a hickory tree was a glistening pool of dark blood, I was tempted to touch its perfectly tensioned surface. Instead, as I stared, it shrank perceptibly, forming a brief meniscus before leveling off again, as if the Earth had taken a delicate sip.

"Death has left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in the front yard," Mann contemplates. "But would a stranger, coming upon it a century hence, sense the sanctity of the death-inflected soil?"