Sally Mann

Mann grew up surrounded by the history of the American Civil War (1861–65). Nearly a third of the battles had been fought in her home state of Virginia. Unsettled by the pastoral appearance of historic sites that had once witnessed incredible devastation, she sought to conjure their violent past in a series of battlefield photographs made between 2000 and 2003. Mann used a nineteenth-century process for producing glass negatives of the landscapes, embracing technical imperfections for their dramatic resonance. To achieve the textural quality of the prints, she coated their surfaces with a varnish containing diatomaceous earth— the fossilized remains of tiny marine creatures. These dark and gritty photographs render the sites as haunted, decimated spaces.