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)

Educational
2001
American
Photographs
Works On Paper
Gelatin silver print
Place Made,United States
Framed: 39 7/8 × 49 15/16 in. (101.28 × 126.84 cm)
Image: 38 1/4 × 48 3/8 in. (97.16 × 122.87 cm)
2004.18
Not on view
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
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
© Sally Mann

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