NPR: Daily Picture Show "Think about where you are, this very moment — and imagine all that has happened there before now.
"When I was in college in Tennessee, for example, my neighborhood was nicknamed "The Fort," because that's exactly what it was during the Civil War. How weird to think that where soldiers once fired cannons, students today are doing keg stands. And actually, I wouldn't have been shocked to see Civil War soldiers milling around the neighborhood; re-enactments were — and are — huge in the area.
"That interests photographer Gregg Segal. "I travel a lot on assignment for magazines and had been increasingly disturbed by the growing sameness of America," he writes in an email. "Wherever I traveled, I'd see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape.' "
...
"Through Hodge, Segal met his cast of characters and, over the course of five trips to the South and Gettysburg, created this series of, for instance, soldiers camped out in front of Domino's."
Below: The Massaponax Baptist Church was used as Grant's HQ in 1864
Massaponax Church, Virginia "Council of War": General Ulysses S. Grant examining map held by General George
G. Meade. LOC Summary: Photograph from the main eastern theater of war, Grant's Wilderness Campaign,
May-June 1864. Date Created/Published: 1864 May 21
Massaponax Baptist Church in 1864. Below: the church location today thanks to Google Earth
This may stress the importance of historic preservation.
