Battlefields, Wilderness (Solarized Trees), from the series Battlefields

Sally Mann is an internationally acclaimed American photographer known for her intimate yet haunting landscapes and portraits. Mann uses 19th century photographic techniques that incorporate collodion solution and a varnish containing diatomaceous earth – the fossilized remains of tiny marine creatures – to develop her richly-textured, often black and white prints. Whether she is exploring motherhood, family, the passing of time, or contemporary social issues, Mann’s evocative images capture moments of curiosity, beauty and loss.

Mann has photographed landscapes of the American South, where she grew up and currently resides, for over three decades. She often documents the unsettling, violent histories of this area, as in her Battlefields series (2000–03). These works show significant battle locations from the American Civil War (1861–65), including Antietam, Chancellorsville and Manassas, that were major turning points in the conflict. The prints were developed using a wet-plate collodion process that was invented in 1851 and would have been widely used at the time of the Civil War. Mann’s atmospheric images of trees, roads and cloudy horizons appear dark and gritty as a visual reminder of the violence enacted in these sites. During the developing process she embraces technical flaws or dust in the negatives, which add texture to the surface of the print, sometimes as bullet- or scar-like specks. These visual cues evoke the death and loss that has taken place across Southern America and ask us to consider how such histories are remembered or forgotten.

Mann says of these works:
‘I think of trees as the silent witnesses to so much of what happened on my poor, heartbroken Southern soil – so many of them are ancient, and surely they hold deep in their woody souls that which happened when the lives of men intersected with theirs when they were saplings...’