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[The Wilderness Battlefield]

G. O. Brown American
1866
Not on view
When G. O. Brown set out to document this place, the violence there had ended. His aims were forensic: he and other photographers traveled to this battlefield—site of two of the deadliest campaigns of the American Civil War—together with a preeminent surgeon, to record and collect the remains of fallen soldiers. The Virginia woodlands appeared to Brown much as they had to an infantryman in 1864, who described approaching the frontlines through "interminable forest and endless night."

Brown’s pictures are stricken with loss. Printed from negatives that have been inadvertently solarized, the images are fugitive. They appear, at times, tonally reversed, their skies suffused with dark haze and punctuated by pale, otherworldly light. Later reproduced for the commercial market, views from the series bore survivors and spectators back to the woods long after the war’s end.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: [The Wilderness Battlefield]
  • Artist: G. O. Brown
  • Date: 1866
  • Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative
  • Dimensions: Image: 4 3/16 × 3 7/16 in. (10.7 × 8.7 cm)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
  • Object Number: 2005.100.944.2
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

More Artwork

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[The Wilderness Battlefield, near Spotsylvania, Virginia]
G. O. Brown
1866
[The Wilderness Battlefield], G. O. Brown American, Albumen silver print from glass negative
[The Wilderness Battlefield]
G. O. Brown
1866
Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, Alexander Gardner American, Scottish, Albumen silver prints from glass negatives
Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond
Alexander Gardner
Former Attribution Formerly attributed to Mathew B. Brady
1865
[The Wilderness Battlefield], G. O. Brown American, Albumen silver print from glass negative
[The Wilderness Battlefield]
G. O. Brown
1866
Julia Jackson, Julia Margaret Cameron British, born India, Albumen silver print from glass negative
Julia Jackson
Julia Margaret Cameron
1867

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