In the introduction to his book, “Whistling Dixie”, Anderson Scott has this amusing remark: “I approached the battleground in my Toyota Prius. I felt like a minnow in a sea of whale-sized pick-up trucks.”
It was 2007 and Scott, a fine art photographer outside of his full-time lawyer practice, had come to photograph another reenactments of the Civil War. He would do that for the following three years, every other weekend. A Native of Alabama, Scott is not stranger to the South and its history. He grew up in Montgomery, Al., the city where the telegraph which would start the Civil War was sent out.
The idea of photographing these reenactments grew slowly with him, as something “ strange,” almost surreal. “Most people see the Civil War as a thing of the past, but when you go to these events, you realize that for many people, it is not beyond us.” Reenactments involve living in a somewhat accurate reproduction of the 1860’s conditions, dressing as Civil War soldiers or Southern belles, sleeping in period-authentic canvas tents cooking over fire, and engaging in mock battles.
Witnessing these plays, Scott realized that there was a wide range of reasons why people would participate. At one end of the spectrum exists a wide contingent of people who think “that the world would be a better place had the South won.”
If some of Scott’s photographs clearly address the anachronism of the situations (commanders on horseback coordinating troops over cell phones, use of coolers in the camps and extra pounds around the belt), others are more subtle and invite us to reflect on this world of make-believe. At the end, the viewer is left with an uneasy feeling, one being, as Richard Benson rightly put it in the book’s afterword, that these historical reenactments have “a slippery connection to history… and their attempt to portray times past is no more accurate than the achievement of the photographs that want to be the reality of the world.”
Virginie Drujon-Kippelen
“Whistling Dixie”
A book of photographs of people who re-live and reenact the Civil War
Photographs by Anderson Scott
Published by Columbia College Chicago Press; February 2013.
