Eliot Dudik | Broken Land

On this Memorial Day, I’m looking at Eliot Dudik’s work on the landscape of the Civil War. Dudik’s collection of landscapes are lush and peaceful places, with trace suggestions of the great historical schisms that once brought our countrymen to kill each other. The images are bisected — whole, but divided.

I find myself mentally divvying out the beautiful contents of each frame — this half goes to one side, this half to the other. I imagine unnatural walls and borders segmenting the American lands.

- Lisa

​“Perspectives on the Civil War and contemporary culture are many and are deeply ingrained in our heritage. Prying open and examining viewpoints objectively is exceedingly difficult, but it is nevertheless an essential responsibility for all citizens if we are to recover any possibility of cultural and political cohesion.

My goals are to create landscapes that come alive with the acts of war, and cause, at least, contemplation of the nature of being American, to allow understanding, communication, and cooperation with fellow citizens. These photographs are an attempt to preserve American history, not to relish it, but recognize its cyclical nature and to derail that seemingly inevitable tendency for repetition.” — Eliot Dudik

You can see more of his work here.