The Carnage of War

The photographs in this exhibit were created in March, 2003, on the verge of the Iraqi/American War. The landscape was formerly inconspicuous rural Virginia roadside that barely attracted my attention as I drove past it every day, twice a day, for the preceding 5 years. Within a matter of days it was ripped open and rendered into a wasteland that fascinated me for its depth, and the level of destruction that had been levied upon it. It was something I had seen in passing once, but never so close. I had to experience it on foot.

Every once in while I have a bad morning and find myself limping towards work with no desire whatsoever to earn a living. Such as it was one March morning that I decided my job could wait. With nearly as much gear as an infantryman, and with a tripod that felt eerily like a huge firearm, I spent a few hours trudging through what was left of a forest. Granted, it was a corporate forest, sowed and nurtured for the express purpose of a future harvest, but still, the devastation was, to me, extreme, sudden and catastrophic, and I found myself in awe at the carnage that had been exacted upon an unsuspecting wilderness. My mind, attempting to come to grips with the overwhelming nature of the scene, began to compare the evident violence to warfare, and the effect of warfare on the body, and on the land.

Suddenly, the broken trees were not cellulose and sap, but flesh and blood. Huge, uprooted trunks were destroyed artillery, smoldering in the aftermath of battle. There were bones in the stripped branches, pools of blood in the collected rainwater from the day before, scattered weapons, bomb craters, etc. Well known images came to mind from history, particularly those of the American Civil War as recorded and preserved in the work of Timothy O'Sullivan, Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardener.

In the beginning, I was so overwhelmed that I didn't know how to approach this landscape photographically, but once the metaphor of war had been established, it was easier to make visual sense of it. In the several return visits I found the metaphor unable to hold up, although I continued to use the underlying theme as motivation.

It was not my intention to make a political statement about the Iraqi/American war, War in general, clear felling, or environmental rape. Rather, I used the concept of War as a Destructive Force to visually organize what was to me a chaotic and difficult scene.

For the technically minded, these images were photographed with Hasselblads, mostly with a borrowed SWC, but some using an ELX fitted with either a 60mm, 80 mm, or 150 mm lens. Most were recorded on Ilford Delta 400, or TMX 100, or TMY 400. Processing was in D-76.

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