Shiloh

2011-2019

I photographed the Shiloh battlefield during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (2011-2015) as my wife and I became new parents and worried over raising our sons in a violent and divided culture of declining civility. For the first few years I only visited on the dates of the battle, April 6-7, but I continued to return in various seasons every year of the twenty-teens as our national predicament worsened. Searching for a place of peace ('shiloh' in Hebrew) in "a universe of battle" as one Union soldier described it, I look at this long-resting landscape that was once the setting for more casualties in two days of fighting than all previous American wars combined, and I remember Faulkner's insight; "The past is never dead. It's not even past."