Let's write about war photography
The Civil War Photographers Before Kirsten Dunst
Check my Maine Writer Vietnam war history photo in this blog.
After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored. |
Echo essay published in The New Yorker, by Robert Sullivan
After a century and a half, the Civil War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive to light and air, have been carefully stored.
“I’ve got some things pulled,” Wade said. He went away and returned pushing a cart holding prints made by Alexander Gardner, a Scottish photographer who started the war working for the better-known Mathew Brady, then went out on his own.
@LHeureux www.mainewriter.com Richard LHeureux PN1, USN, Vietnam fox hole Chu Lai MCB 71, in 1967. A Maine Writer war history photograph. |
Recently, Dennis Fisher, a Marine combat photographer now in his seventies, stopped in to see negatives that he had developed in Vietnam, in 1967, and 1968. He was assisted by Cecilia Figliuolo, an archivist with an interest in combat photography, who spoke to him about the photos he had made twenty-eight years before she was born. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘This is the first time I’ve held these negatives since I was 20 or 21,’ ” she wrote in “The Unwritten Record,” one of the archive’s blogs. Sitting with the veteran, Figliuolo learned details that the archivists could only have guessed at. As Fisher studied a picture of two men firing mortars in May, 1968—part of a U.S. operation to clear land south of Da Nang—he told Figliuolo that he had brought a tape recorder along on the mission, to record the sonic chaos. “Did you take your recorder out with you every time?” she asked.
“No, I took it out once, and it was such a pain in the ass to lug around I never took it out again,” he said.
When Fisher returned home from the archive, he phoned Figliuolo, and played her the cassette tape, but what she remembered long after his visit was that, when he had stared at the battle scenes in the archive, it was as if that audiotape were playing in his head. “In that moment, I could tell that he could hear it,” she said. “He remembered everything.”
Published in the print edition of the May 6, 2024, issue, with the headline “War Stories on Film.”
Labels: Celia Figliuolo, Chui Lai, Civil War, Dennis Fisher, L'Heueux, MCB 71, Robert Sullivan, The New Yorker, Vietnam