[The Wilderness Battlefield]

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.