John Huddleston: Killing Ground, Photographs

Saturday, 10 September 2005 10:41

LINCOLN, MA.-Vermont photographer John Huddleston has spent many years photographing famous and forgotten Civil War battlefields. In John Huddleston: Killing Ground, Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape, he juxtaposes his contemporary color images with black-and-white copies of historical photographs of the very same places. These pairings are sometimes poignant, and sometimes disturbing, but always rich with meaning. T They explore the legacy of the War Between the States, which left 620,000 soldiers dead and over 500,000 wounded, as expressed or concealed by the shifts in land use, culture, and commemoration over the last century and a half. Some battlefields, like Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, or Bull Run (Manassas), Virginia, are maintained as sacred precincts, and are visited by thousands of tourists annually. Others, less known and left unmarked, are now the sites of strip malls and tract housing. And remote and rural locations appear uncannily unchanged over the intervening decades. Says Huddleston in his book, “A major emphasis of this project is the resonance of history in the landscape. Are physical and spiritual traces of the great slaughter still present in those places?...The search for the latent energies of these battlefields inevitably leads back to histories, metaphors, and myths. The tensions and sufferings of the soldiers involved in the riotous circumstance of these locations 140 years ago may come to us through written descriptions, the color of the soil, or collective memory. The histories and diaries we read are mental abstractions of the historical events of the place. Thoughts of the living and the dead become enmeshed, and these particular ideas are inextricably linked to the land.” John Huddleston is a professor of art at Middlebury College in Vermont. His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in Harper’s, Preservation, Worth, and DoubleTake.

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