Sally Mann documentary @ Sundance

In late 1969 a flood swept through the Mann family plot in Virginia. It dumped a huge boulder in front of a cabin door, and Sally Mann’s father wanted it out of the way. He asked Sally's then-boyfriend, Cee Turner, if he knew anyone who could help move the boulder. Cee did, and the three men all tugged mightily at the stone in an attempt to dislodge it. It didn't budge. Then Cee's friend looked at the other two guys and stood back. 

"[He] said let me do this," Sally says. "He reached down and he lifted the stone by himself, put it up on his back, moved it to the front door of the cabin, put it down, and turned around and looked at them as if it were effortless for him. Cee Turner told me that he knew at that moment I was going to marry Larry Mann. It was like love at first sight."

Sally Mann tells this story in a new documentary titled "What Remains." Directed and produced by Steven Cantor, the film debuts this week at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004 on the occasion of a Sally Mann exhibit at the Corcoran (from which this film takes its title), I wrote that Mann "must be the most personal artist in America. Her camera is her diary, her photographs its entries." Cantor’s film is a wonderful, lilting look at Mann and the motivations behind her photographs.

The relationship between Sally, her husband, and the "What Remains" photographs is at the crux of the documentary. Mann’s series is about death -- that is, not the process of dying, but about things that are dead. Each part of Mann’s series is presented in the film, just as they were in the Corcoran show: photographs of the bones and skin of Mann's dead dog Eva, wet collodion-made images of Civil War battlefields (are those mounds of earthen hills – or graves?), snapshots of a place on her farm where an escaped prisoner shot himself, decomposing corpses, and close-ups of her children's faces.

The film also includes the first images I've seen of a series that art world folks have known about for a while: Sally's photographs of Larry. Mann calls the series "Marital Trust." It includes everything from bathing to shaving to working in the garden, to sex.

"I think of this series as an aesthetic savings account," Sally says. "I know they're there and I know they're good. Maybe they'll never come out. Maybe they'll come out after I kick the bucket. But it's a very comforting thought to me that those pictures are in that box in my darkroom."

Sally, lying on the bed as Larry gets dressed after modeling for her, mentions that two-thirds of their lives have been spent together. Larry doesn't quite know what to say. "That’s weird," Sally says, more to fill the silence than because it is.

In the next frame of the film, with a couple sentences of text, Cantor explains the quiet: In 1994 Larry Mann was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. The disease is weakening his muscle tissue – especially in his right leg and his left arm – and is incurable.

More tomorrow.

Related: The catalog from What Remains at the Corcoran, Cantor's Stick Figure Productions, the Roanoke Times' Kevin Kittredge on the documentary, Sally Mann on art: 21.