Gettysburg 7 (Unidentified Timbers Family Member) | C-Print | 18" x 24" | 2016

Artist Statement: Civil War battlefields, as they are now memorialized, are strange, highly negotiated spaces. While there is general agreement that the history these sites preserve is important, the complexities of how this history is presented and how the land has been changed to accommodate current stakeholders’ interests has not been adequately explored. War colleges run by our armed forces make frequent use of these locations to teach our aspiring young officers military history and tactics. Historians, archaeologists—scholars of every type—come to these sites in support of their research. And then, there are the literally millions of tourists who visit annually, whose importance cannot be underestimated because it is their support that keep these parks open. These audiences come with disparate and often contrary purposes for doing so.

Battlefield Project started as a way to explore of all this, a way to question how particular memorialized sites have evolved from the scarred and blood soaked fields where often tens of thousands fell and died, to what they are now.

Many of the photos included in this series are simply documentation of sites and phenomena directly observed. Others record digital projections of archival photographs of soldiers or heroic paintings of battle. These projections are cast upon the sites where those depicted fought and fell. Rather than post-production collage via Photoshop layering or the like, I am interested in the physical integration, image wrapping over structure, and how projected fragments from the past are supported by and illuminating of the landscapes and structures they are cast upon.

Whether observed or constructed, the goal of these photographs is the same—to create a compression between a traumatic past and the present day, a space where the relationship between site and memory, the now and that fleeting moment where the nation almost succeeded in tearing itself apart, can be investigated. Additional works from this series can be found at: jeffbeekman-battlefiedproject.com.