Untitled #9, Antietam, from the series Last Measure (Primary Title)
Untitled (Antietam #18), from the series Last Measure (per JBR 12/2009) (Former Title)
Last Measure (Series Title)
Sally Mann, American, born 1951 (Artist)
One of today’s leading photographers, Mann was born and raised in Virginia, where she continues to live and work. This image—-part of her series made at Civil War battlefields and titled after a phrase in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—shows a cornfield beside “Bloody Lane,” the sunken road where thousands of men lost their lives in the Battle of Antietam. Piercingly clear at the left edge, the image becomes a cloud of photographic emulsion in the center. This nearly abstract, painterly drama suggests the strife and anguish of war. Mann’s experiments with the19th-century collodian wet-plate process—in which she pours emulsion onto a glass plate shortly before exposure—help her transcend photography’s realist conventions to achieve a heightened level of expression.
Label copy 2012, John Ravenal
Label copy 2012, John Ravenal
number 4 in an edition of 5
From write-up:8 x 10" collodion wet-plate negative, coated in a mixture of matt varnish with earth to provide a protective layer for the photographic surface as well as a subtle physical texture that provides metaphoric resonance with the work's content.
National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art
2018-2020: “Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings”, National Gallery of Art, March 4 – May 28, 2018; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, June 30 – September 23, 2018; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, November 20, 2018 – February 10, 2019; Museum Fine Arts Houston, March 3 – May 27, 2019; Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, June 16 – September 15, 2019, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, October 13, 2019 – February 2, 2020.
2010-2011: Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit, VMFA, 11/13/2010-1/23/2011
2010-2011: Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit, VMFA, 11/13/2010-1/23/2011
© Sally Mann
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