“Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,” Wallace Stevens wrote in “Sunday Morning,” and if ever visual proof of this assertion were needed, Sally Mann’s new book might provide it. The large-format volume, gorgeously produced, is titled “What Remains” (Bulfinch Press, 132 pages, $50). I emphasize the beauty of the book itself because the images it contains, mostly of decomposing human bodies, are gruesome at first glance and their power to repel and to fascinate is strangely enhanced by the exquisiteness of the presentation. Her book prompts the question: Can a photograph of something we habitually consider repulsive be a thing of beauty, be a work of art? On the evidence of Ms. Mann’s new work, the answer, I think, has to be yes.

Sally Mann has long been known for her frank portraits of her son and daughters, taken from infancy until the verge of adolescence. Though she uses a heavy Toyo view camera with an 8-by-10-inch negative, more usually suited for landscapes, architectural photography, or formal portraits, the images of her children which she produced always had a spontaneous, almost improvised quality, as though despite the unwieldiness of her equipment she were a candid “street photographer.” The effect of these earlier images is extraordinary, not only because of her technical skill but because somehow Ms. Mann brought into play, again and again, the pristine innocence of the lens.

Many of these lovingly crafted photographs of her children showed them naked, and this provoked outcries over supposed “exploitation” – along with suspicions of “prurience.” But if ever prurience were in the eye of the beholder it was here, for the children in their grace and their ungainliness, as well as in their complete freedom from shame, appeared as innocent as young animals, frisky and basking in the confidence and beauty of their own bodies. The books that resulted from this project, such as “Immediate Family” or “At Twelve,” represented the visual translation, into black-and-white prints of startling freshness, of Walt Whitman’s “Body Electric.” If there is anything shocking in these images, it isn’t her daughters’ nakedness but the unembarrassed clarity of the photographer’s eye.

In “What Remains” our appalled attention is drawn first to photographs of bodies in various stages of decomposition. These were taken at the University of Tennessee’s anthropological research facility in Knoxville, Tenn., where human cadavers are exposed to the elements for the purpose of forensic study. (A few of Ms. Mann’s photographs accompanied an article on the facility by Lawrence Osborne in the New York Times Magazine.) Ms. Mann doesn’t mention this in the book, probably because she intends the images to speak for themselves, and speak they do.

Ms. Mann used old-fashioned glass plate negatives to make these images, which are as scarred, pocked and lacerated as the pitiful remains they depict. Some of the objects are unrecognizable at first glance and take on a fantastic and suggestive beauty; others cannot be mistaken. In one a naked man lies face-down in the grass beneath a dark leaved thicket that arches over him; his skin is disintegrating in slabs and shards, like ice at the end of winter. In another, a naked woman in an advanced state of putrescence sprawls on her back, legs splayed, skin fissured and showing a bronze-like patina, as though she were turning into metal. The images shock, but the longer you look, the longer you force yourself to look, the more you notice how intimate these bodies appear to be with the earth on which they lie. The grass, the shadowy leaves, the soil itself, are steadily absorbing them and turning them into something at once homely and wondrous.

We can grasp Ms. Mann’s intentions more fully when we turn to the section of the book entitled “Antietam.” The battle fought there, on September 16-17, 1862, was one of the bloodiest of

the Civil War, with both sides bearing horrific casualties. The 14 plates, juxtaposed with Whitman’s verses, are thick with the power of darkness: dark tree shapes, barely delineated stalks of grasses, the smudged horizon riddled with pinpricks and dust specks (from the antiquated printing process Ms. Mann prefers), giving the impression of bullet-holes in the sky or grieving stars. The power of the dead, whom we have encountered face to face in the opening section, has transformed the earth that once consumed them. These are tragic vistas, and yet they remain.

The title of the book can be taken in more than one way. At first I thought it was a reference to the 19th-century German poet Holderlin’s line, “What remains, however, the poets create.” Then, I wondered if it were meant as an exclamation of black humor: “What remains!” In the last section of plates, also titled “What Remains,” Mann’s intentions become clear. This section consists of ambrotypes of her children’s faces, taken in extreme close-up. These are eerie and spectral portraits, ghostly as unearthed statuary. But they are infused with a shadowy vivacity, as though the living and the dead shared a common and undivided realm, a continuum held together by the earth itself. The children, past and present, for whom time is somehow still malleable, are “what remains.”

Ms. Mann’s choice of antiquated processes, such as collodion, to create these images was inspired. The ragged and scarred emulsions, with their ripped corners and cracked edges, intensify the force of the plates. At the same time, they establish a link with the past when such processes were commonplace; they assert a continuity of vision between Mann and her predecessors in the art. And yes, in answer to the question I posed at the outset, the images themselves, often of ugly things, are supremely beautiful. They are beautiful because they allow us to see the very countenance of decay while directing our gaze beyond it, and because they do so without flinching.