In 2011 Michael Falco began photographing Civil War battlefields in commemoration of the wars’ sesquicentennial. It occurred to the photographer that these battlefields, many of them persevered soon after the fighting subsided, were 19th century landscapes in our midst. Walking these battlefields, 150 years on, is like walking back in time….the past is present on these battlefields.
During his visit to the Battlefield at Manassas Virginia during the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Bull Run, Falco struck up a conversation with a group of local reenactors. The photographer soon realized that many modern day reenactors have a direct familial connection to this history. Many of these reenactors are participating in the battles and units their great, great grandfathers fought with in the 1860s.….the past is very much present for these Americans.
Join photographer Michael Falco as he explores the visual remains of this seminal period in American history exploring and photographing the wars’ battlefields and sesquicentennial battle reenactments through the rudimentary eye of the pinhole camera.
It is still possible 150 years later to stand on these battlefields and feel for oneself the power and trepidation of the great “War Between the States”. The pinhole camera seems the perfect tool to explore and render this epoch. Requiring long time exposures, the pinhole camera lingers on these subjects, capturing the very essence of the Civil War landscape.
The pinhole camera also seems to render the blurred, smoke-filled reenactments as they were perceived by the combatants. In period memoirs one hears the constant refrain – the battlefield is described as a dreamlike landscape.
The famous battlefields of the war are photographed from the soldiers perspective. The terrain and topography of these battlegrounds, the soldiers’ line-of-sight on these fields, are the focus of these images. Accordingly, at the reenactments, Falco has become a reenactor himself adopting the guise of a 19th century photographer blending in and photographing the mock battles from the soldiers’ point of view as well.
The Civil War has been described as this country’s truly epic struggle, America’s Iliad. Nearly 150 years on the echoes of this time can still be felt and seen…the past is present. From the Mississippi Delta to the rolling fields of Pennsylvania, the Civil War landscape speaks to us in a language the pinhole camera seems somehow innately able to transmit.
Following the sesquicentennial timeline the Civil War Pinhole Project will explore twenty major battlefields and battle reenactments of the war and will eventually conclude at Appomattox, Virginia April 2015, the 150th anniversary of the wars’ conclusion.
The Civil War Pinhole Project takes inspiration from the sentiment of author Robert Penn Warren who wrote, “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”
To learn more about this project, its progress and its future, visit Michael’s blog.