Killing Ground: The Civil War and the Changing American Landscape

by John Huddleston

" Killing Ground is a significant contribution, a new way of looking at highly familiar images."―Shelby Foote "These haunting photographs of then and now offer a new and powerful perspective on the tragedies and triumphs―above all, the human cost―of the Civil War. John Huddleston's photographs of selected spots on dozens of battlefields of that war, juxtaposed with photographs of soldiers killed or wounded there and other contemporary illustrations, make telling points in a unique manner. This book does more than prove the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words; it tells the poignant story of the Civil War in a way that goes beyond words."―James McPherson " Killing Ground situates us uncomfortably in a terrain where living memory has only recently completed its transformation into history. John Huddleston has photographed the scenes of this vast communal hurt, from the mightiest battles to obscure actions involving a few combatants; in every instance he asks the land itself to yield up what traces it may hold of the mortal issues contested there. Suburban intersection, brushy tangle, murky pool, well-tended battle park―all are joined by a commonality that Huddleston insists we not Americans died here, killed by other Americans."―Frank Gohlke In Killing Ground , John Huddleston embarks on a photographic odyssey through the modern-day landscape of the Civil War. He pairs historical images of the conflict from sixty-two battle sites across the nation―battlefield scenes, soldiers living and dead, prisoners of war, civilians, and slaves―with his own color photographs of the same locations a century and a half later, always taken at the same time of year, often at the same hour of the day. Sometimes Huddleston's lens reveals a department store or fast-food restaurant carelessly built on hallowed ground; other images depict overgrown fields or well-manicured parks. When contrasted with their mid-nineteenth-century counterparts, these indelible images challenge the meaning of place in American culture and the evolving legacy of the Civil War in our national memory.

Genres: History, Photography

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 22, 2003

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

The format is a facing-page pairing of American Civil War photographs, evocative of various battles, and Huddleston’s own photographs of the battlefields as they appeared in 1990 or so. The Civil War images are your standard mix of Matthew Brady’s bloated blackened battlefield debris, intense individual portraits (“These men appear composed, despite the pressures upon them, as they look into the eye of time”), blurry exposures of camp commotion, and fire-hollowed southern cities in which only the masonry stands (after they burned Jackson, Mississippi, Union troops nicknamed the city “Chimneyville”); and then there are rare medical images from the archives of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology* that give the reader some idea of the look of the postwar society that had absorbed nearly half a million wounded veterans – there are a number of eerie shots of men in waistcoats and neckties, but no pants, showing their sawn stumps, while seated on the little tasseled stools and posed against the cheesy painted backdrops of Victorian portrait studios.


As for Huddleston’s own pictures, they made me think of William Eggleston – the world of Eggleston which Janet Malcolm once described as

defined by the presence of recently made structures, machines, and objects; by people dressed in clothes of the cheap, synthetic, democratic sort; by the signs and the leavings of fast food, fast gas, fast obsolescence…

In short, images of hyper-banality – and great power. Huddleston writes that he made most of his photographs “in areas where the heaviest killing in a battle happened.” So we get a shot of a Nashville intersection – an Exxon station, a Taco Bell drive-through menu, a Kentucky Fried Chicken marquee (“HOT WINGS ARE HERE”) – whose caption reads: “Site of the Union attack on the Confederate Left. 7, 407 American causalities.” A one-story vinyl-sided house in Gaines’ Mill, Virginia, with a child’s bike on the lawn: “Center of Battle Lines, Site of Several Unsuccessful Confederate Charges. 15,587 American Casualties.” Petersburg, Virginia’s K-mart – coin-operated miniature carousel and sheathed shopping carts – was the site of Fort Sedgwick; opposite, Fort Sedgwick as it looked in 1864, a trenchscape of hovels scooped out of the dusty soil and bough-less trunks in the bleak dissolving distance. A pair I keep going back to is that of the studio portrait in which Lorenzo Dickey, aged 21, of Maine, wounded at the battle of Chantilly, Virginia, shows his nearly hip-high amputation; and opposite, the parking lot of the Chantilly office park where in August 1862 the Confederate center first received the Union charge – “2,100 American casualties.” The sign as you exit the lot reads: “Have A Nice Day.”


Huddleston's introductory essay is a rich specimen of confused and contradictory ideals that I would comment upon if it wasn't 2:15am and if I didn't have to move all my books into a new apartment tomorrow morning. Civil War historiography is my thing but Killing Ground is in its box and I'm not going to see it for a few days.


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* When I was at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, making copies of its photographs of the Civil War wounded, a box was received from a World War Two veteran. Inside the box were the remains of a Japanese soldier killed in the Pacific that the American soldier had managed to keep in his basement for forty-five years. (Pg. 8) Now that's fucked up!

[Sissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction is well-worth reading. I disagreed with the layout, had I been the editor I think I could've strengthened the presentation had it been organized differently. Besides my personal thought on it, I enjoyed it.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unfiltered view of change in our countryside through the lens of a camera.

[Shangjin Zhong · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's ok