1864

“For Brandt, photographs are not mere documents of passing time, but material objects that bear traces of their subjects and by extension the weight of associated politics and social unrest. With 1864, he wanted to address the legacy of the Civil War through objects infused with history and place, but that spoke to a contemporary context. Brandt scoured the Internet for images of Atlanta and was struck by George Barnard’s photographs made in the aftermath of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign through the South at the end of the Civil War. Barnard’s photographs, which Brandt found on the Library of Congress’ website, were made in the Fall of 1864, following a decisive victory that crippled the Confederacy.

…

To create the prints for 1864, Brandt developed a process that is both apt and slightly tongue-in-cheek: albumen prints that contain the ingredients of peach pie. Albumen prints, an emulsion whose main ingredient was egg whites, were the dominant form of photograph through much of the second half of the nineteenth century and the printing process favored by Barnard. Brandt augmented the antique process with a few additional ingredients—peaches, cinnamon, flour, salt, sugar, and butter—to infuse the prints with a touch of Southern flavor. While Georgia is no longer the leading the producer of peaches, they are still the symbol most widely identified with the state. Appropriately for this body of work, it is a distinction that arose in the wake of the Civil War as cotton production fueled by slave labor was in decline. More than a trite indulgence of stereotype, the choice of peaches as a medium evokes the evolution and remaking of a place in new terms.”

—excerpt from the book ‘1864: Albumen Photographs of Southern History’ by Greg Harris, 2018

“His new series, 1864, recreates George N. Barnard’s 19th century images of a devastated, post-Sherman Atlanta. Using source imagery housed at the Library of Congress, he makes new albumen photographs from Barnard’s images. “Fortifying the foundational ingredients of the 19th-century albumen print — egg whites, silver nitrate, and salt — with peaches, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and butter, Brandt plays with external assumptions about the South, at the same time revealing a complex understanding of the complicated history his project explores. Brandt began working on 1864 in early 2017, informed by a February visit to Atlanta (his first) and a fascination with the online catalog of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Georgia’s reputation as the Peach State, now tenuous, calcified in the three decades following the Civil War. Brandt’s large scale photographs of the ruins of Union Depot, once situated between Pryor Street and Central Avenue, or Confederate Peachtree Street (then Whitehall), compress time, creating a symbolic conversation
at turns funny and reverent, and loaded with unexpected associations.” The result of these efforts was an exhibition at the prestigious Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, GA, in 2017.”

—LENSCRATCH, Matthew Brandt: 1864, by Aline Smithson

http://lenscratch.com/2018/06/matthew-brandt-1864/