Sally Mann's husband, Larry Mann has muscular dystrophy and she made a series of black-and-white photographs portraits taken over six years entitled Proud Flesh. The relation of artist and model is, traditionally, a male-dominated field that has yielded countless appraisals of the female body and psyche, and Mann reverses the role by turning the camera on her husband.

The images are contact prints made from her working with wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate.

Mann exploits the surface aberrations that can result from the unpredictability of the process to produce painterly photographs marked by stark contrasts of light and dark, with areas that resemble scar tissue. In works such as Hephaestus the scratches and marks incurred in the production process become inseparable from the physical reality of Larry's body.