Published in 2010 by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Sally Mann’s The Flesh and The Spirit gathers work from across her career around one persistent subject: the body. Rather than treating corporeality as a single genre, the book places early platinum prints from the late 1970s alongside Polaroid still lifes, color photographs of her children, landscapes, self-portraits, and nude studies of her husband. The result is an extended inquiry into how bodies are seen, remembered, exposed, and altered by time.
Mann’s treatment of the human form is inseparable from vulnerability and mortality. Sensuality coexists with physical fragility; intimacy can carry both affection and unease. The landscapes broaden that inquiry rather than interrupt it, connecting the figure to place, memory, and disappearance. Across the assembled series, the visible body repeatedly approaches something less tangible—the psychological, the memorial, and the spiritual dimensions named by the title.
The publication also makes Mann’s technical experimentation central to its argument. Platinum printing, Polaroid, ambrotype, gelatin-silver printing, and collodion wet-plate negatives are not presented as antiquarian effects, but as methods that transform the presence of a subject. Uneven surfaces, tonal density, and the contingencies of older processes complicate photography’s claim to faithful description, allowing flesh to appear at once immediate and remote.
Curator John B. Ravenal provides an introduction and entries addressing the individual series, while essays by David Levi Strauss and Anne Wilkes Tucker offer further perspectives on photography, memory, and representation. For a serious collection, the book’s importance lies in this sustained, cross-career framework: it brings materially and thematically varied bodies of work into direct relation and documents how one of Mann’s principal concerns developed through changes of subject and process. It is valuable not merely as a selection of familiar images, but as a structured account of the ideas and methods joining them.
