The Cornfield Maquette (2021)

In the first year of the Pandemic, I decided to publish a book of my Antietam images. Antietam was a key battle of the Civil War, a sort of Gettysburg before there was Gettysburg, and the battlefield is largely preserved today as it was on September 17, 1862, when the North faced the South outside of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The South was on its way further north to end the war in a victorious stalemate, the North sallying out of the fortified national Capitol to stop them.

And the North did stop them, at a horrific cost in lives to both sides, one of the deadliest days in American history. Many of the most famous photographs from the Civil War, the scenes showing the after-battle carnage that must have so shocked viewers back in the 1800s and are still shocking today, were made at Antietam.

I had made numerous photographs at Antietam, going up week after week with my 4x5 view camera in the spring of 2004 and then going back again, shooting in color, in 2019 and 2020.

The idea was to combine the color and black and white photographs—thus combining two very different approaches to photographing the battlefield—and to include an essay I had written as an interlude. I teamed up with book designer Bob Aufuldish and our plan was to develop a maquette—a book dummy—that was intentionally only partly developed. My thinking was that we could team up with a publisher and use our maquette as a starting point—or use it as something to react against—and in the end we’d have an amazing book.

Bob and I did our part, working together and incorporating into the design many good ideas. But I couldn’t find an art-photobook publisher interested in publishing a book related to the Civil War. Later I attempted to print the maquette in physical form with a printing company that specializes in printing short-run photobooks, but Covid-caused supply problems of the paper we needed blocked that path as well.

Maybe someday I’ll try again.