Another project that I worked on for a long time was the Civil War battlefields, like Gettysburg and Antietam and Charlottesville. I had a Volkswagen camper and I used to just take off for two or three days, four days, and sleep in there. I got very involved with the Civil War battlefields, and I would get up early in the morning when no tourists were out in the fields. That was another time you would actually feel the battle. If you knew a little bit about how the battles were fought, you could actually hear the guns, you could hear the cries, and you could hear the horses. But that's how you did it. Taking pictures, you have to get involved emotionally, other than that they're just shells. They're nothing really. You have to get involved with it, fully involved, totally involved. In fact, there would be days when I couldn't get any pictures and I'd feel bad, I would actually feel bad. If I would go out somewhere and spend a weekend and felt I didn't do a good picture, I would actually feel bad, I would. The Civil War battlefield pictures, I did a lot of motion where I moved the camera and threw the lens out of focus and I got grizzly -- the statues, they have so many monuments like in Gettysburg, with different brass monuments -- just to photograph them realistically didn't mean anything to me. So I would change them. I would move the camera, or I would knock it out of focus a little bit, or something like that. I would make them like death masks, like the people were actually dying. Or I would just take a hand just dripping down, and maybe when it was raining have water dripping off the hand, it almost looked like blood coming out of the fingers. There was a lot of things you could do with a little imagination. You could change things around. You don't have to point a lens at something and take it the way it is. You have to see a little beyond the surface.

DESCRIPTION:

Oral History: Nearby Gettysburg provided Harvan the opportunity to reflect on life, death, and the human struggle in a historical setting that is very much alive today

CONTRIBUTOR: 

DATE ADDED: 2010-07-30 16:06:25

COLLECTION: Gettysburg, 1970s

ITEM TYPE: Oral History

CITATION: in Miner's Son, Miners' Photographer:, Item #441, https://chnm.gmu.edu/harvan/items/show/441 (accessed February 1, 2022).

About the Original Item

Publisher
Creator
Source
Interview with Harvan
Subject
Gettysburg
Format
audio
Associated Files