Antietam (2019–2020)
I couldn't get Antietam out of my head so I did what I almost never do with photographic projects--I went back. In fact, I went back to make images twice more, in 2019 and in 2020. The 2019 trip was hot, and I set out on foot each of the days I was there, parking the car when I arrived and coming back to it at the end of the day. The 2020 trip was even hotter and I would sometimes retreat to the car to recover in the air-conditioning, on full.
Rather than shooting the landscapes I photographed the weeds, the rocks, and, of course, the corn.
After my 2004 trips to Antietam, I wrote an essay. Here's a small extract:
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan, an easier war to start than the Bush Administration’s preferred target of Iraq. All this time later we are still there, fighting, though you might be forgiven for not knowing that the war continues, given the airwaves and Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds all but drowned in faux- rage 24/7 headlines. Soldiers are still fighting and dying in a war that looks less like a war and more like a scattering of obscure minor infantry engagements, suicide attacks on outposts I was unaware of before they were attacked, events disconnected from one another, their purpose and significance a puzzle to me and probably a puzzle to the participants themselves.
No wonder that it all doesn’t garner much public attention. It is boring and we’ve grown accustomed to being entertained. Turn on the computer, turn on the TV, look at your phone and it waits for you, your fellow citizens, your neighbors, members of your family consumed with the state-of-play in the great red state, blue state battle, the investigations and the courts, the deep conspiracies, the real news and the fake, the statues that needed to be pulled down and the paintings that needed to be burned.
If you believe in one thing and they another, you can no longer disagree. Your adversary is a liar, a dupe of higher powers, a criminal, and evil. They must be stopped, they must be destroyed. In our daily lives, moving amongst those like ourselves, we feel the tribal kinship, the comfort of shared worldviews, independently arrived at. Online we are at war with shadow citizens bent on the destruction of all that is dear, all that makes America *America*.
Antietam may look like a bunch of empty fields and nondescript woods but there is so much to photograph there, and so much to think about.
