On a broiling June day in western Virginia, Sally Mann told me how she brought her dead dog back to life.
“He died on the trail,” she explained. She knew that Comfit, one of her Belgian Malinois, had breathing issues, but not fatal ones. “I picked him up and carried him to the riverbank, slid him down the riverbank into the water, hauled him into a little spit of land, and I just started beating him. And that’s when he took a breath.”
She shook her head in astonishment, smiling. Her steel-wool-colored ponytail bounced as she climbed the hill that encircles her house. “His tongue had gone pitch black. If I had been a real photographer, I would have shot that tongue all covered in sand.”
