Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street
Through Nov. 15
The earth and its relationship to mortality are Sally Mann's terrain in this series on the battlefields of the Civil War. It is a subject far removed from the lyrical landscapes of the American South and the intimate glimpses of family life that she has dealt with in previous photographic essays.
Nearly 150 years after Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner recorded the war ''live,'' Ms. Mann has visited the various fields -- Antietam, Manassas, Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, etc. -- to capture their spirit and perhaps invoke the needless destruction of all wars, present-day included.
Her manipulation of her predecessors' cumbersome baggage -- the collodion wet-plate glass negative that had to be developed immediately -- has produced a group of retro-looking, painterly photographs whose minimal but elegiac imagery has the charge of somber poetry. As with the old, technically crude process, the prints are scratched, blurred, often hazy and streaked and spotted with points of light; some are deliberately given semi-arches at the top corners to create the look of an old album.
Earth, sky and a fitfully lighted darkness prevail. ''Antietam No. 5'' presents a dense black land mass, faintly arched at the top, that covers three-quarters of the picture surface. Above it is a narrow band of threatening sky whose gray tone is partly relieved by a suffusion of moonlight.
A beautiful evocation of the Wilderness battlefield involves a dense, black, hilly shape in the foreground, with a path at the right leading to the horizon and a blackish sky shot with light. The silhouette of a scruffy bush atop the hill makes a nice transition between earth and sky.
The most daring of these photographs, in its seemingly questioning emptiness, is ''Manassas No. 15,'' a horizontal stretch of blank land with a narrow line of light defining its faintly scalloped top edge. There it meets a broad band of gray sky, with a glimpse of half a tree at the left edge of the photo, just for inflection. Over all, this is a powerfully eloquent show. GRACE GLUECK
