It will all make sense some day..

Sonder / Commentry #1

A parking lot on the vast southeastern plains of Colorado where the horizon is 360 degrees of wild unbroken prairie under a massive cloudless summer sky. I am far away from everywhere all over again. It's hot and a blustery July wind harasses me, tugging at my clothes incessantly, pulling from all directions, promising to drive me mad if I don’t take cover from it soon.

This is a photograph of me, taken in 1864. I have seen myself in history, like this, many times before, but it is not often I have had the presence of mind to get a record of it with my camera. It was part of a tourist information display at the site of the terrible Sand Creek Massacre. This photo is a close up of a larger group photograph of the US Volunteer soldiers that were part of it. It looked out at me and seemed to make eye contact from across time and across a parking lot like a spectral face in a distant scrying glass.

The face is one of the 675 anonymous murderers of 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians which took place on the morning of November 29th 1864. Under the commanded of Colonel John M. Chivington and using small arms and howitzer fire, the troops drove the people out of their camp. While many managed to escape the initial onslaught, others, particularly noncombatant women, children, and the elderly fled into and up the bottom of the dry stream bed. The soldiers followed, shooting at them as they struggled through the sandy earth. During that afternoon and into the following day, the soldiers wandered over the field committing atrocities on the dead and dying before departing the scene on December 1st.

I don’t know why this photograph is me, but I don’t know why I am me either as I stand here looking at it today. And, as I begin to make a photo-record of it, I hold this question close, just in case the revelation that I am certain it holds, has a fuse on it. I let photographs naturally impose their own cool presence of mind upon the scene and I try, in this instance, to keep my-self out of it. The hope being that it will all make sense some day, later, upon reflection, tomorrow maybe.. I trust photography with all of these mysteries of the world and I have come to regard my camera as another sense apparatus with which to perceive it.

The wind finally snags my hat and I chase it through the long grass, flapping my arms and shouting like the madman it promised it would make of me.

Both Sonder and Descendant are available to order from Bump Books.