W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #rogerfenton, #timothyosullivan, #themine, #valleyoftheshadowofdeath,

Here is a landscape with terrible history in it. My colleague Darius Himes, the head of photographs at Christies, writes about this: “a regimen of Pennsylvania soldiers, all of whom were miners back home, concocted a plan to dig a tunnel all the way under the Confederates, stuff it with explosives and blow them up, thus breaching the defenses and providing an opening for an advance. The entirety of the plan was completed—and can you imagine the horror of that moment?—except that the crater was so immense and confusing to the advancing soldiers that the Union ultimately suffered a disastrous defeat to General Robert E. Lee”.*1

He then astutely directs you to Roger Fenton's Crimean war image “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, 1855.

Both works are redolent with death yet do not show it to directly, you need to do some thinking while looking. The cannonballs provide an entry point.  

Absence speaks volumes.  

There was show about the history of abstraction in painting at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris that surprised me by beginning with the landscapes of J.M. Turner. It made sense to me instantly and serves as a reminder that the best of abstraction is grounded in meaning, and ironically enough, that may mean straight representation, not swirls of clouds and light.  

These two landscapes of the detritus and destruction of war resonate with feeling for me. There is an inescapable density. How stunning to find a seeming reference to the Sept. 11th images in “The Mine” with the barely standing wall of verticals looking like the ribs of the destroyed World Trade Center.

So often the power in photography is not the literal — the dead — but the inferred — the crater, the void. It’s in how we finish the story for ourselves.

*1 Darius Himes instagram, 19 Sept 2021 https://www.instagram.com/p/CT-yOqDl0Hm/

©2021

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