Mann follows the life cycle through different phases, from images of her children’s lithe, active bodies through searching (and affecting) mid-life portraits of herself and her husband Larry, to a profoundly uncomfortable series on rotting bodies at the “Body Farm,” a laboratory in Tennessee where donated bodies are left out in the open to decay for forensic and scientific study. Raw and confrontational, all these images provoke strong emotions—sorrow, lust, fear, disgust. One thing’s for sure: you can’t be neutral about a Sally Mann image.
     Even when Mann makes images of landscapes, she can’t seem to escape criticism. In 2001, after an escaped convict had shot and killed himself on her 425-acre farm in Virginia, leaving his blood to soak into the ground, Mann decided to explore the legacy of Civil War bloodshed in the South. Using the 19th century wet collodion process, she made images at Civil War sites like Antietam, where 23,000 soldiers were killed and wounded in 12 hours of battle. Critic Hilton Als found the images too overblown, with a Southern Gothic aesthetic that mythologized the landscape. Actually, the ones presented here seem rather quiet and brooding—perhaps too obscure for anyone without an immediate connection to the South, but undeniably powerful and evocative.
     The Flesh and the Spirit is not easy to look at. As Mann has aged, her work has become increasingly stripped-down and meditative. The questions it poses—about sex and mortality, bloodshed and decay—are not comfortable ones. For some people, Sally Mann’s work might evoke such strong feelings that they prefer to look away. Others will find themselves irresistibly drawn to these images, appreciating their darkly expressive qualities, and seeing in them fleeting echoes of their own relationships, questions, and dreams.