Deep South, Untitled (Dark Glow)

Description

Using a large-format view camera and nineteenth-century photographic processes, Sally Mann infuses this view of a dim glow amidst a thickly-overgrown, seemingly impenetrable forest with a sense of mystery and foreboding.

Mann’s technique is at once aesthetic and conceptual. The dark halo cradling the circle of light and the visible dust and scratches on the negative function as visible metaphors for the tumultuous and dark racial history of the American South, as though the landscape itself is haunted by misdeeds of the past.