Killing Ground: Photographs of the Civil War and the
Changing American Landscape.
Nineteenth century images by
various artists. Present-day
photographs and text by John
Huddleston. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002. 185
pages. 86 halftones, 77 color
photographs. $35.00.

Killing Ground is not an easy book to like. This is due less to its somber subject matter and sometimes gruesome imagery than to John Huddleston’s expectation that readers put more thought into looking at the book’s pictures that most of us normally devote to visual material. As a photographer who hopes his own pictures communicate more than just the obvious, I found the challenges presented by the images in Killing Ground worth the effort required to decipher them, and I liked the book very much. But I can understand how others might not.

Most of the pictures in Killing Ground are presented in pairs. Typically, a black-and-white Civil War-era image (in most cases a photograph, though occasionally a map, print, or drawing) appears on one side of a two-page spread with one of the author’s modern-day color photographs facing it across the gutter. Nearly all of Huddleston’s pictures are from sites of Civil War battles, some of them well known and some not. A few of his images are from battlefields now preserved as parks (and interpreted as “history”), though most of the places he photographs reveal no visible connection with their violent past. Each picture has a caption providing location, date, and a brief bit of historical information. Captions to the modern images include casualty figures for the battle fought at the site.

The book’s power derives from Huddleston’s pairing of images. Some of the pairs are obvious. A block of peak-roofed modern apartment buildings at Rappahannock Station, Virginia, echoes the shape of the tents at a Union army encampment after the battle there. Timothy O’Sullivan’s famous photograph of a Gettysburg field strewn with dead is paired with a view of a Gettysburg College athletic field dotted with tackling dummies and blocking sleds. Battlefield markers are visible in the far background. But there’s more to most of the pairings than a simple then-and- now look at the same face. Huddleston’s photograph of a modest ranch house in Gaines’ Mill, Virginia, is all right angles and flat planes with the exception of an offkilter child’s bicycle abandoned on the front lawn. On the facing page, the bodies of dead from the 1862 battle at Gaines’ Mill lie in an open field, having been unearthed from their shallow battlefield graves and left scattered about by hungry animals. They too seem abandoned and, like the bicycle, forgotten— their presence disruptive to the prevailing order but noticed and recorded only by the photographer.

Other pairings are not so obvious. Many of these rely more on formal similarities between the older pictures and those made by Huddleston than on literal content. One of the 19th-century photographs is of a middle-aged Lorenzo Dickey, an amputee who, the caption tells, was wounded at Chantilly, Virginia, when he was 21. He wears a suit, waistcoat, and tie and sits on an upholstered stool. The right leg of his pants is cut away to reveal a stump at mid-thigh that ends with a broad, smile-shaped scar. On the facing page is a recent photograph of an office park under construction on the site of the Chantilly battle. In the foreground is an oval-shaped flowerbed set off from the asphalt around it by a curbstone painted “no-parking” yellow. The lop-sided curve of this curbstone is exactly the shape of Mr. Dickey’s scar, a fact that connects the two photographs on a level entirely beyond the purely factual.

Other pairings derive from metaphorical associations— perceived, imagined, or created by Huddleston—between the two images. One of these shows two 19th-century medical photographsof amputated feet on the left hand page and pairs them with a presentday picture of the lush, inviting, deep-green grass carpeting the Mt. Zion Church battlefield in Richmond, Kentucky— grass that feet such as these will never walk on. Another pairs a photograph of inmates at the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, with a picture of a diffuse gray and white cloud surrounded by blue sky. The latter image is captioned “The Sky above the Prison,” alluding no doubt to the wish of every man in the older photograph that he could sprout wings and fly away from that terrible place.

I have to admit that some of the pairings remain a mystery to me. I’ve enjoyed trying to puzzle them out but don’t seem able to. In the process, though, I looked really hard at the pictures involved and got to know them better than I would have otherwise. And that’s what I like about Killing Ground—the way it uses visual imagery to elicit thought in those looking at the images. After all, it doesn’t matter if you “solve” the reasons behind John Huddleston’s pairs. What does matter is that you look at this set of serious, thoughtful pictures about a pivotal event in America’s past and present, and, if you are so inclined, think about them.

DAVID WHARTON