Killing Ground, Healing Ground: An Interview with Photographer John
Huddleston
Armed
with a camera, Middlebury College professor John Huddleston makes
pilgrimages into the American landscape to capture touchstones for
shared cultural memory.
Interview by Alexandra Tursi
Posted: May 1, 2008
"Viewed apart, my photographs can be seen as a somewhat random
sampling of the contemporary American landscape," Huddleston
said. Viewed together, as in his series, Killing Ground,
Huddleston's images of the current state of Civil War battle sites
juxtaposed alongside images of those sites during and after battle,
ask the viewer to contemplate the historical through the lens of
the modern, and vice versa.
Huddleston answered 10 questions for Identity Theory,
ranging from his sentiments on former Civil war sites that now house
shopping centers to the artists with whom he'd most like to share
a cold beer.
What prompted you to revisit and photograph the sites of
Civil War battles and incidences for Killing Ground?
The impetus for this project came from living near Civil War battlefields
and experiencing their beauty and power from an early age. My father's
military knowledge and presence (from a career in the army) brought
substance to the events that took place on those fields. I felt
excitement, chaos, pain. I felt respect for the sacrifice and heroism
of the soldiers, and I felt the fear of having life itself so removed
from one's control. These emotions coexisted with the serenity and
physical beauty of the land.
What technical considerations did you employ in photographing
the images?
I used a large wooden camera (8" x 10" film size) similar
to those used by the photographers of the Civil War. The resultant
method of working was slow and deliberate, with time for the photograph
to be shaped by thought.
What was your reaction to photographing the site of a battle
that is now either a Kmart or a mini-mall?
When I was in my early twenties, I revisited Asheville, North Carolina,
where I had lived in my early teens. As I walked over ground I had
once played on, memories I had thought were long gone flooded back.
Are there not also cultural, shared memories that can be evoked
by touching the same land where our ancestors had significant experiences?
If that land is fundamentally altered, is the memory dimmed? Civil
War battlefields are touchstones for memory. They contain traces
of great struggle, commitment, and suffering. The land sparks a
shared memory of human conflict and suffering. We cannot afford
to lose these markers.
As a culture with pronounced respect for military endeavor, the
expedient treatment of these battlefields does not bode well for
other land that has no claim to the special status of "sacred
ground."
In addition to the paired images, the series also include
portraits, engravings and medical photographs. How important was
creating context in presenting this work?
Very important. The historical images included are extraordinary
documents of the events, societies, and mythologies of the war.
Their acute, distilled observations maintain a sense of urgency
even today. We measure ourselves, and society, through comparison
with other epochs.
A society sustaining a war effort seeks to control or eliminate
the imagery of its own dead and wounded. Soldiers are portrayed
as brave and cheerful, the systems of supply as efficient, victory
as inevitable. In pictorial and verbal descriptions, the deaths
of soldiers are made palatable by emphasizing glory: they died heroically
confronting the enemy, defending the homeland. War is described
as destiny, a part of the natural order. The other side is responsible
for the horrors.
Civil War photographers were certainly aware of these parameters,
and because of patriotism or for profit many cooperated. Some photographers,
such as Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, were overwhelmed
by the actualities of the war and operated on the original premise
that to show what they saw would give people a better understanding
of the realities of this and other wars. Their belief is still a
hope of many war photographers today. Pictures of the dead and wounded
are rarely silent, and despite attempts to set them in a political
context, they ask, Was it worth it? Was there no other way?
Some may label your work as "rephotography."
Why is this a good or bad categorization?
Very few of the diptyches are rephotographic in that precise sense
of duplicating the view of an earlier photograph. I wanted to be
free in responding to the modern landscape and its meanings.
In coupling the historical photographs with my own images, I sought
wide-ranging connections of culture, politics, economics, and environment.
If these conceptual links are supported by formal relationship,
all the better. Emotional and physical ties in the pairings were
also important.
The pairings of photographs and their interchange, however, need
not exclude independent readings of either the historical or the
modern image. Both of these separate sets of photographs were made
by searching for the traces of war. The Civil War photographers
were obviously much closer in time to the action of the battle,
but with few exceptions they photographed the battlefields after
the fact of the killing. They, too, searched for visual material,
after the action, to examine what had happened. With their proximity
in time, they produced dynamic photographs of immediate consequences.
With my distance in time, I have made photographs more concerned
with the long-term results.
The Civil War images inform my photographs to a great extent. They
are eloquent testimony of the participants and the events. They
shade the modern picture with a complex but specific historic context.
Viewed apart, my photographs can be seen as a somewhat random sampling
of the state of the contemporary American landscape. Where the armies
or companies of soldiers happened to meet to kill each other depended
on such a wide assortment of factors, including chance, that I could
have been throwing darts into maps to determine where I would photograph.
We often view landscapes within an implicit context of geological
evolution and time. The landscapes of today and the Civil War add
the crucial modern context of human use.
The current conditions of the battlefields embody our dispositions
towards the environment. Indicative of the entire country, these
attitudes stretch from total disregard to real appreciation of natural
systems. I found the widespread dispersion of garbage to be incredible.
Styrofoam cups, hamburger containers, and packing peanuts are literally
everywhere. Some battlefields have even more serious forms of pollution.
Others have simply been leveled to create more space for shopping.
My photographs inform the reading of the Civil War photographs
also. The modern pictures may be seen as consequences of, and reflections
upon, the acts of the Civil War soldiers. Today we may stand on
a battlefield and imagine what happened and its effects, just as
some Northern and Southern soldiers may have stood on the same ground,
before or after the fighting, and wondered how they were affecting
the future. This was, after all, an intention in going to war: to
shape history, to extend their side's version of manifest destiny.
What is the most interesting comment you have heard from
a viewer?
The feedback I find most gratifying is the connections people make
with the diptyches to reflect upon our current situation. Many viewers
have remarked on the contemporary meaning of Killing Ground.
More odd is a tendency toward nostalgia and romance that take hold
of some viewers despite my efforts to the contrary.
What are you currently working on?
A book of photographs--Healing Ground--on the landscape
of Vermont farming. Under economic and social pressures, agriculture
here has changed often and in significant ways, but the family farm
still remains, tenuous, under siege. The photographs record agricultural
cycles of life and death, seasonal transformations of farm fields,
and the borders with woods, swamps, and residential developments.
The beauty of productive land is primary, but abandoned apple orchards,
farm pollutants, and the continual spread of housing are significant
parts of the work. The book will be out within a year, published
by the Center for American Places and Columbia College.
I am also working on two other series of photographs: The Northern
Forest, a counterpoint to the small farm landscapes and Anima
Mexicana, a look at religious influences, past and present,
on the Mexican spirit.
From where do you gather creative inspiration?
I try to draw my art and ideas from everyday life. The Civil War
battlefields are places of high drama, but I have attempted to make
my photographs low-key to relate to the more mundane. I hope this
attitude opens the images to a wider thinking.
If you could have breakfast with one artist, who would
it be and where would you take him or her?
The work, discipline and unprejudiced vision of photographers Robert
Adams and William Eggleston mean a great deal to me. Having a beer
with them in the local bar (probably not for breakfast) would be
nice.
Have you ever made an artistic pilgrimage? If so, where
did you go and why?
Not to be flippant, or too low-rent, but every time I walk out
with the camera feels like a pilgrimage in terms of what I attempt
to cultivate in my person--quiet, open, attentive. The grander sort
of trips I have made, to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for instance,
are usually less important artistically, and much more rare. I’m
not so smart--I need several pilgrimages a week.
___
|
