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LANDSCAPESOF AMERICAN HISTORYBlogs

Leo Hsu

16 Feb 2012

Why is it that the sites of labor massacres across the country are little

known and obscure? asksAndrew Lichtenstein. These are choices that

we make: to make the Liberty Bell and the signing of the Declaration of

Independence these giant tourist attractions. What we choose to

remember and why we choose to remember it is what makes us who

are." In his study of Landscapes of American History, Lichtenstein

presents a view on history that goes against the grain of the narratives

that we hear in election years (and increasingly, that we hear all of thetime), that America and Americans want or should want the same

things or believe the same things, and that Americas destiny as a country has

followed a clear or necessary trajectory. This project has value because Lichtenstein

recognises that how past events are memorialised is at least as important as

decisions about what is memorialised.

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Cross Keys, Virginia. There is no marker or monument at Cabin Pond, a small swamp in rural

Southampton County, Virginia, where the slave Nat Turner first received a vision that it was his assigned

task to free America's slaves with a rebellion. Cabin Pond is also where Turner planned the rebellion in

the summer of 1831 and where he fled to hide after its failure several weeks later. He was captured about

a mile away. Turner's rebellion so terrified slave owners in the region that they attempted to erase it from

history, as well as enacting new laws that made it illegal to teach slaves to read or write. Andrew

Lichtenstein/ Facing Change

Lichtenstein explores the histories of conflict in America and the suppression of the

rights of groups of people, telling of their struggles. His photographs range across

the USA and contemplate histories on the cusp of being forgotten of the struggles

for labour and civil rights, and of native Americans as well as more recent contests

such as gay rights and the legacies of deindustrialisation. (A few weeks ago

MSNBCs PhotoBlog ran a four-part series showcasing the project, which can also

be seen in a somewhat different presentation on the Facing Change: Documenting

America site (here, here and here). Neither presentation represents the entire body

of work.)

Montgomery, Alabama. At the exact bus stop where Rosa Parks boarded a city bus for her famous trip to

fight segregation in 1955, participants in a Sons of Confederate Veterans "Confederate Heritage Rally"

wait to march up Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery, Ala., to recreate the 1861 inauguration of

Jefferson Davis. Strongly denying that the Civil War had anything to do with the issue of slavery, speakers

at the rally celebrated Jeff Davis as the last president of a truly free Republic. Andrew Lichtenstein/

Facing Change

Landsca es of American Histor is im ortant in that it makes claims on behalf of

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histories that stand to be forgotten. Injustices that led to later social

transformations were no less injustices; these are moments that cast doubt on the

idea of American exceptionalism. The project is driven by his desire to locate

subjects that address histories that stand to be ignored: The Black Hills of South

Dakota, where Indian sovereignty and a gold rush intersected at the massacre at

Wounded Knee, and a farmer in Nebraska, on former Sioux land, who has lost his

son in combat in Iraq; the Everett Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts where working

conditions led to the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 and where factories lay now in

rubble, demolished for uncompleted urban renewal projects; Civil War re-enactors

and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Lichtenstein photographs in memorialised locations: slave cabins in Destrehan,

Louisiana, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. was

assassinated, the barely recognised former site of a Mississippi slave market, and

the memorial at the site in Ludlow, Colorado where the Colorado National Guard

attacked striking miners and their camps, resulting in the deaths of 11 children. He

also takes note of the grassy knoll in Dallas where John F. Kennedy was killed, the

Stonewall Inn where the American gay rights movement was born, and the fields

outside of Lake Placid called Timbuctoo, near John Browns home, where in the

1840s abolitionist Gerrit Smith made 120,000 acres of land available to African-

American men so that they could have the right to vote.

Memphis, Tennessee. The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King was assassinated

on April 4, 1968, is now the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum recreated Kings last room, with

cigarettes in the ashtray and the bed sheet pulled down. Mahalia Jacksons song Oh Precious Lord,

Kings favorite song, plays over a set of speakers, and visitors from around the world still come to pay

their respect, to both the man and the dream. Andrew Lichtenstein/ Facing Change

Some of the pictures are invested with a kind of psycho-geographic charge: take, for

example, Lichtensteins picture of Cabin Pond, the swamp near Cross Keys, Virginia,

where Nat Turners 1831 slave rebellion ended. Others indicate that some past

experience continues to inform the consciousness of the living: in 2011 Lichtenstein

photographed the relatives of some of the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist

Fire, some of whose remains, buried in a mass grave, have only recently been

identified with DNA analysis.

wonderful job capturing the impacts of thevent in the landscapes and portraits. It hard to imagine life going on amidst sucdevastation, but it does. It will be a long,Garden of Ashes 1 month ago


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Deer Island, Massachusetts, March 2, 2011. During the cold winter of 1676, at the height of King Phillip's

War, Christian Indians were rounded up from their separate villages across New England and left on the

exposed island, without food or blankets. Several hundred Indians who had embraced the colonists' way

of life froze or starved to death. Andrew Lichtenstein/ Facing Change

Avoiding too studied a stance, Lichtenstein creates the opportunity for connections

between three moments: the moment at which something happened, the moment in

which the photographer made the picture, and the moment in which the audience

encounters the project. The pictures are made in such a way that a connection

between audience and historical subject that will extend beyond the experience of

these pictures is encouraged, even as there is no attempt to disclaim the

photographers subjectivity; this is an overtly activist documentary photography,aiming to provoke consciousness and to build counter-discourses. Its Lichtensteins

attempt to draw attention to events of which there is little visual record, but its also

a record of his own journey to acknowledge these histories.

The Landscapes of American History project is a kind of anti-photojournalism,

drawing attention to the constraints of photojournalism as it is practiced

professionally, industrially. Photojournalists invest a great deal of energy in being in

the right place at the right time. We praise them for this while at the same time we

question whether pictures taken in the midst of the action tell us the whole story, or

enough of the story, or if these pictures reduce the story to the action, allowing the

publishing industry to determine which moments will be preserved in our memory.

The project responds to those limitations by taking a longer view, and organised

around a measure of time and distance.

Addressing the relationship between past and present, these pictures are not about

being there at the right instant, although many of them do establish a powerful

sense of moment. That is, they are not telling because they have condensed time and

visible relationships, but because they provide room to imagine the expansion of

time, and a connection to the past through looking at contemporary photographs.

As Lichtenstein reminds us, the way in which you look at the past shapes how you

look at the present.


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On July 7th, just outside of Blair, West Virginia, James Weekly, the last resident of Pigeon Holler, is visited

by a friend. James, a former coal miner, refuses to sell his land to mining companies which are seeking to

strip mine the mountain he lives on to remove billions of dollars worth of coal. Blair Mountain is a historic

site because of a 1921 battle between union coal miners and hired company guns. The state of WestVirginia, under pressure from coal companies, has refused to list the mountain as an historic site to be

preserved and plans to continue mining the area are moving forward. Andrew Lichtenstein/ Facing

Change

History is full of loose ends that are selectively ignored and purposefully forgotten

in order to tell the clear, streamlined stories that politicians need to tell in order to

create confidence among their supporters. One of these loose ends is James Weekly,

a former West Virginia coal miner who refuses to sell his land to mining companies,

another kind of invisible man made visible by this project. Lichtenstein observes

that while these loose ends are frayed, that they would be easily forgotten or

ignored, they speak to the movements and struggles that have defined if not the fact,

then at least the possibility, of liberty and justice for all.

Leo Hsu

www.lichtensteinphoto.com

facingchange.org

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