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.".

• Position: Focus on America - Exhibition of photography by Sally Mann

"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...