Battlefields, Antietam (Starry Night),

2001

Antietam (Starry Night) forms part of Mann’s extended photographic exploration of Southern landscapes “sculpted by death,” including historic Civil War sites. To capture the Antietam battlefield in Maryland, Mann used nineteenth-century photographic processes—a large-format camera, glass plates, and hand-applied chemicals—to generate visual effects that are characteristic of early photographs, such as darkened corners and small white spots. These imperfections suggest scars left on the landscape by war, resulting in an elegiac mood that memorializes the twenty thousand people who died at the site. “When the land subsumes the dead, they become the rich body of earth, the dark matter of creation,” Mann writes.