"Does the earth remember?” The infinitely gifted photographer Sally Mann asks this question in the catalogue of her great retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. On view there is her series of Civil War battlefield landscapes, among the most ravishing works of art from the early 2000s. Once sites of brutal violence, they’re now scraps of rolling fields or unremarkable clumps of trees, like the battlefield at Antietam. It’s still the most bloodied land in the country, with deaths multiples of those on 9/11. “Do these fields where unspeakable carnage occurred bear witness in some way?”
21 April 2018
