May 20, 2010 - Sale 2215

Sale 2215 - Lot 447

Price Realized: $ 21,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
MANN, SALLY (1951- )
Untitled (Antietam #16). Oversized silver print, 48x38 inches (121.9x96.5 cm.), with Mann's signature, date and edition notations 1/5, on verso; printed by Mann from the original wet-plate collodion negative; archivally drymounted and finished with custom mixed Soluvar varnish. 2000-2002
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Additional Details

From the Edwynn Houk Gallery, N.Y.; to the present owner.
Deep South, 93.

"The hands of time are stilled by the resonance of history at the sites I photographed."


The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history with approximately 23,000 casualties, wounded or declared missing. Close to 150 years after Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady documented these horrors of war, Mann chose to approach the subject matter from a different perspective exploring how death can affect one's perception of a particular place and the earth's endless cycle of mortality. Within this environment, life comes full circle; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Mann stated. "It was springtime again when I photographed those battlefields, and the air was fragrant. It smelled like rich loam. It smelled like grass, the eternal life of the dead."

Like her predecessors, Mann used a view camera and the wet-plate collodion process. (The collodion used to create the plates was also used in attempts to heal war-time wounds.) Originally introduced in 1851, this process was a way of producing photographic negatives on a glass plate coated with a silver nitrate solution that was placed into the camera and exposed while still wet. The photographer has only about 5 minutes to make the image before the solution dries. Mann constructed her portable darkroom in the back of the family SUV.

Mann became interested in producing this imagery as a result of her preoccupation with the immense loss and suffering endured in the South. Years prior, in 1972, she found about 10,000 glass negatives taken around her home of Lexington, Virginia by a soldier returning from the Civil War. She cleaned and printed the negatives for about two years; among the images were landscapes she was very familiar with, and in the process she became immersed in a 19th century aesthetic.

This particular series is spiritual and ghostly, with heavy mounds of earth and the horizon blurred in the distance. The outcome often looks torn and unevenly burned--the violence of the picture-making process mimicking the remnants of violent death in the image. Mann's glass plates were old and flawed and the photographs have slightly rounded edges, similar to the photographs found in century-old albums. Here, in this landscape, Mann rewrites the past, now devoured by fog and shadows.