Shiloh

Shiloh is the elegy at the center of this evening land. Most of these pictures were made on the anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. I started going to the battlefield as my wife and I prepared to become new parents and worried over raising our sons in a violent and divided culture of declining civility. Searching for a place of peace in “a universe of battle” as one soldier described it, I look at this still landscape that was once the setting for more carnage in two days than all previous American wars combined, and I remember Faulkner’s insight, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”