As a lifelong resident of Lexington, Virginia, the burial place of
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Sally Mann sought to reckon with the carnage
of the Civil War. Photographing the “death-hallowed ground” of battlefields in
the early 2000s using equipment and processes reminiscent of the nineteenth
century, she made apocalyptic images that suggest the final view of those who
perished there. As if to bring the “deposit of fallen bodies, hopes, loves,
joys, and fears” to the surface of her Battlefields
pictures, Mann coated her prints with a varnish incorporating diatomaceous
earth—the fossilized remains of tiny marine creatures.