Research On Sally Mann

Sally Mann:
The reason I choose to have a look on Sally Mann is because she did loads of photos of corpses each decaying in a different condition. This gives her a wide range of conditions in which a murder victim can be found in, meaning she can see and photograph the way in which dead bodies react to different environments and how the body decays in that environment. This is interesting because it means she has lots of experience with taking photos of dead bodies.

Here we see what happens when a corpse in buried for a long period of time then dug up again. In this we can see that most of the flesh has decayed but there is still hair attached to the top of the body.

In this we see what happens when a body was left outside to be ravaged by wild animals. We can see that large chunks of flesh have been removed. This was probably done by wolfs looking at the tear pattern. 

Here we see what happens when nearly all of the flesh has decomposed and there is just the skeleton left behind. 

Here we see what happens when a body is left outside and then inhabited by spiders. We can see that the eye socket has been fully cover in spider webs and the head is covered.

 This photographer has influenced me to explore the conditions of someones body after the body has began to decompose for a prolonged period of time. I would like to try and experiment with this by leaving flesh and clothing outside for some time and what happens to it after a long period of time has passed.

To summarise Sally Mann took photos of people bodies in lots of conditions to see what prolonged exposure to certain elements of nature does to a human body. She would also take her photos in black and white. This created an effect that made the bodies seem like they had been left out for longer than you would have thought.