John Huddleston: Killing Ground, Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape
John Huddleston, Second Cabin Creek, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory
Arcade Gallery
September 10, 2005 – January 8, 2006
Exhibition Opening: Friday, September 9 from 6 – 9 pm
Vermont photographer John Huddleston has spent many years photographing famous and forgotten Civil War battlefields. In John Huddleston: Killing Ground, Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape, he juxtaposes his contemporary color images with black-and-white copies of historical photographs of the very same places. These pairings are sometimes poignant, and sometimes disturbing, but always rich with meaning. They explore the legacy of the War Between the States, which left 620,000 soldiers dead and over 500,000 wounded, as expressed or concealed by the shifts in land use, culture, and commemoration over the last century and a half. Some battlefields, like Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, or Bull Run (Manassas), Virginia, are maintained as sacred precincts, and are visited by thousands of tourists annually. Others, less known and left unmarked, are now the sites of strip malls and tract housing. And remote and rural locations appear uncannily unchanged over the intervening decades.
Huddleston’s photographic project reveals the American landscape as a profound site of memory, loss, history, indifference, natural beauty, and urban sprawl. This exhibition of 25 diptychs is accompanied by Huddleston’s book, Killing Ground, Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Says Huddleston in his book, “A major emphasis of this project is the resonance of history in the landscape. Are physical and spiritual traces of the great slaughter still present in those places?...The search for the latent energies of these battlefields inevitably leads back to histories, metaphors, and myths. The tensions and sufferings of the soldiers involved in the riotous circumstance of these locations 140 years ago may come to us through written descriptions, the color of the soil, or collective memory. The histories and diaries we read are mental abstractions of the historical events of the place. Thoughts of the living and the dead become enmeshed, and these particular ideas are inextricably linked to the land.”
John Huddleston is a professor of art at Middlebury College in Vermont. His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in Harper’s, Preservation, Worth, and DoubleTake.
Special Programming in Conjunction with This Exhibition
Members Day: The Magic-Lantern Theater’s Civil War Show
Museum Galleries
Saturday, September 10, 2005, at 1 pm and 2:30 pm
Travel back in time with America’s only Civil War magic-lantern show, an authentic 1890s visual extravaganza that captures the pain, the patriotism, and the humor of the time. The show uses an antique "magic-lantern"—the multi-media projector of 100 years ago. It rapidly projects spectacular color slides on a full-size movie screen. The slides, many of them animated, illustrate Victorian Civil War stories, songs, and comedy. They're dramatized by a costumed showman, singers, and musicians—and by the audience, which provides the sound effects, claps, stomps, and joins in chants and sing-alongs.
RSVP by Thursday, September 8 to 781/259-3629 or membership@decordova.org. Please specify whether you are reserving for the 1 pm or 2:30 pm show, and how many are in your party. Each show runs approximately 40 minutes.
Gallery Talk: Meet John Huddleston
Third Floor Lobby
Saturday, October 22 at 3 pm
Free with admission
The act of creating artwork can be just as exciting as looking at the final product. Meet New England and regional artists to discuss their work on view at DeCordova in the current exhibitions.
