“...OUR ENTIRE SOCIAL SYSTEM HAS...
“...our entire social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.”Fredric Jameson
“Postmodernism and Consumer Society”
My color photographs and video are part of an ongoing exploration of culturally significant landscapes. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the pivotal engagement of the American Civil War was fought in July of 1863, I began my work with a walking tour of the battlefield monuments, referring occasionally to the National Park Service map. However, along the periphery, my understanding of the past became dislodged as I encountered contemporary, commercially manufactured forms that seemed to function as monuments in their own right. I searched for a way to reconcile my understanding of the past with those present day elements.
Historians have written that the Civil War defined America as a modern industrial nation; and that perspective became important to the direction of my project. It seemed likely that the legacy of Gettysburg was to be found not so much among battlefield monuments to the heroic dead as among contemporary forms in close proximity. Using multiple photographs of those forms, I mapped the terrain according to my own experience and built a visual composite that might facilitate new interpretations of Gettysburg. Each viewer’s historical understanding and expectations of the location will play a vital role in interpreting my work, which is a negotiation of how much of the past we might retain in the present.