that which remains

The past is embedded in the Virginia landscape. Generations have farmed the rolling hills, climbed crumbling stone walls, and hidden in the land’s dense forests. Generations have navigated narrow dirt roads bypassing eighteenth-century buildings, homes where children still sleep in bedrooms of their great-great-great grandparents, post-offices where letters first came by horseback, rusted tracks of early railroads, and villages where the formerly enslaved founded communities after the Civil War.

I came to the area of Loudoun and Fauquier counties in Virginia as the nation began tearing down statues glorifying the Confederacy and as a more representative narrative of the Civil War struggled for traction. In this area, Civil War trails, heritage preserves, and historic markers dot dirt roads and byways commemorating Confederate generals Jeb Stuart, John Mosby, Stonewall Jackson, and enslavers whose plantations are still working farms. But as I explored the area, it seemed that stories of the enslaved, of anti-secessionists, unionists, the underground railroad, pacifists, and anti-slavery Quakers were less visible. They all had equal claims on the land.

Violence, division, inequality, loss, conflict, domination, and even of reconciliation haunt this Virginia landscape. The scenery is beautiful, but seen through history the view is uncertain, blurred, and variable. What we see depends on who we are and where we come from. Our personal pasts establish our blind spots and our points of clarity.

These photos are of historic landscapes in Loudoun and Fauquier counties that survive much as they were between 1861 and 1865. They were taken with a digital camera with the capacity to render perfectly focused images. But the more I visited these places, the more it seemed that representing them through a single, focused  point of view gaslit the ghosts of all who had lived in and contested these spaces over time. I decided to add blur and distortion to the images through placing broken glass, odd bits of plastic, and glue between the lens and the subject, and to present the spaces through the duality of the diptych to represent the realities of different points of view. The captions that accompany images are from diverse people who lived and fought on this land. The images are intended to shake up the presentism, the revisionist perspectives that often channel our views of the past into a unilateral interpretation of history.