Photographer’s Reflection

The Point of Beginning

While on a family vacation in the early 1960s, my family drove along US 40, the National Road, in western Pennsylvania. I would guess that I was nine or ten years old when Dad pulled into Fort Necessity National Battlefield. We walked to a small stockade, situated in a small valley in a meadow. Dad explained the significance of what seemed to be a sad and small example of the John Wayne film Fort Apache. What we learned that day about the significant events at Fort Necessity and the real history, which was so important to Dad, is something I have never forgotten.

There are many traits I inherited from Dad and they tend to feed each other: curiosity, wanting to know how, why, where, and when, and on a parallel track how I can make an image of that to visually defne the answers to those basic questions. The art and craft of design and photography is something I grew up with, Dad being a graphic designer as well as commercial photographer. It was total immersion.

The photographs in this book have been created with the same adherence to quality and excellence that has been my North Star for several decades. I accept nothing less than what I perceive are the best possible images. The illustration of history requires from the very start an understanding of the story. Meeting reenactors at a Colonial Fair a few years back and seeing the original equipment, which was handmade almost three-hundred years ago, and its uses in the making of maps made the history even more understandable. What could possibly be more enticing than a map? A window to places far away and maybe forever unseen—with a map you can get an understanding of the “where” question, and then read about the “why.”

The challenge in a project such as this, with the goal to create a sense of place through a series of images about activities that took place centuries before with the best of modern photographic tools may at first seem like a contradiction. But history took place in real time of those who lived it, in living color and in sharp focus. The photos were taken with that thought paramount. Seek the experts who re-create the total experience, work closely with them to create the scene, and whenever possible in the places where it happened.

This project from the beginning was intended to visually re-create the art and practice of surveying and mapping the American wilderness in the eighteenth century. The members of the Department of the Geographer undertook actual surveys and measurements and permitted me to accompany them as they walked into the woods. This group of living historians provided primary sources that brought the project to life. Their adherence to the established standards and practices spelled out in the manuals their predecessors used, along with the equipment and instruments of the time, make for compelling and accurate photographs. They did the work as it was done some two hundred plus years ago. I worked around them.

The landscapes and terrain where George Washington and his fellow surveyors performed their tasks was the American wilderness. Broad expanses of land, rivers, mountains, and valleys. That reality seemed to me to require a cinematic approach to the project. The land and the perspective are broad, the activities of the surveyors and geographers very detailed. I took wide-angled images of the scenes and the men who might have stepped out of the history books, and at times extreme closeup details of the tools they used and the hands-on recording of their measurements with pencils on paper. Paper has a texture; pencils leave a trail of lead and can score the paper. It is important to see those details. So, please join us and observe these colonial surveys and be aware that over our shoulders is the presence of George Washington.

For myself, the return to Fort Necessity was a pilgrimage, a chance to revisit a memorable trip from the early 1960s. The fort at the bottom of a valley appeared to be inviting the military catastrophe that was the only military surrender by George Washington. His actions were the catalyst for the Seven Years’ War, better known as the French and Indian War in North America, which many consider to be the first world war. The small rebuilt fort is an integral part of the history of early America as well as a reminder of the role of the surveyor and geographer in the development and expansion of the United States across the continent.

The point of beginning took place fifty years ago. Being there again represents the lifetime of learning that it takes to visually interpret the stories I heard from my dad.