Philadelphia Introductions: William Earle Williams

WIlliam Earle WIlliams, Forks of the Road, Natchez, Mississippi (2003)

Philadelphia Introductions:
William Earle Williams

by
Andrea Kirsh

January 14, 2007

We look but there’s much we don’t see. When stories are not told, history is distorted. William Earle Williams’ photography helps us see. His photographic project is an act of archaeology, to recover the sites, and with them the stories of the contributions of African-Americans to American history. He describes it, citing Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as a song for unsung heros.

Williams was born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, near a national park that commemorates one of the decisive sites of the Civil War, the most crucial event in American history. Yet he was forty years old before he would learn that USCT (United States Colored Troops) participated in the battle. The ground is nourished with their blood. And, in an irony of history, the Confederate forts surrounding Vicksburg were built by African-American slave labor.

The American Civil War and the Crimean War, ten years earlier, were the first to be documented photographically. Matthew Brady and his assistants brought the horrors of battle to the public as the war progressed. They sold commemorative cartes-de-visite at the edges of battlefields, and their imagery would color history’s understanding of much of the war. Yet the images that have been published and republished as documentary evidence do not include the participation of the 186,000 African-American troops.

The greatest work of art to commemorate the Civil War does include black soldiers; yet Augustus St. Gaudens’ monument is not dedicated to them, but to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the mounted white officer who led the African-American foot-soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Regiment. Shaw and a third of the men died within a month.

Williams’ spent ten years and covered more than 50,000 miles on the project of Unsung Heros: African American Soldiers in the Civil War, which also includes sites of significance in the Underground Railroad and other acts of resistance to slavery. He knew that there were stories that needed to be told. Historians such as William Gladstone had begun to publish about slaves’ resistance and African-American participation in the war, and Williams’ work built upon their work as well as his own research. But the need was brought home to him when talking with a descendent of one of the soldiers. The project took him to places that no artist had bothered to record. Many sites were unmarked in any manner and some place names had been changed. He spoke to local people at each location, in an attempt to place the battle or event, and found sites on private property, in woods, and on country roads. Some of the dead were recorded in cemeteries, others by stone memorials, but for many, Williams’ work will become their first memorial.

The photographs are modest in size and presentation (7"x 7" gelatin silver prints) and are resolutely mundane. They show fields, cemeteries, woods, a stone wall, a rural building, a small-town street corner. And they are bereft of people. They are not “landscapes” composed by artistic convention with a framing foreground element or a horizon determined by the golden section. In fact, they work against such conventions. Some of them have vertical elements in the middle, interrupting what should be the focal point behind them. Forks of the Road, Natchez, Mississippi (2003) has a slightly crooked street sign bifurcating the foreground, a “one way” arrow facing us, the blank verso of a stop sign on the other side. The sign is posted on grass beside a road. A modest country house sits behind and trees further back. Otherwise all we see are the rear end of a truck in the right middle-ground, three telephone poles and attendant wires and what is probably a radio tower behind the trees. It is not picturesque, nor does it have the poetry of William Christenberry‘s similarly dead-pan views of the rural South. But Williams wants us to note this place. According to his text (to be published along with the series of photographs): "This was the site of the South’s second largest slave market in the nineteenth century. Enslaved people were also sold on city streets and at Natchez Under the Hill. This market was last used for slave trading in 1863. Union troops then used the market buildings as a refugee camp for newly freed slaves and as housing for occupying Natchez." There's a recently-erected State of Mississippi historical marker, but it gives no sense of the market's location. For that we have only Williams' photograph, with its reversed stop-sign as ironic commentary on the slave trade that is no more.

Another image is all middle ground, with no clear center of visual interest: Ruins Tabby Warehouses, Darien, Georgia (1999) shows the remains of a brick wall, seen from below, running horizontally across the top third of the image. The end wall of a house appears behind it at left, and below it, filling most of the image is scruffy land where the building once stood. That’s it. Yet it commemorates a site of particular import: The raid and destruction of this low-priority military target lead by Colonel Montgomery of the 2nd North Carolina (depicted in the opening scenes of the movie Glory) so incensed Colonel Shaw, commander of the 54th, that he vowed his troops would never be used in this way again. Through intermediaries Shaw got the 54th assigned to lead the assault on Battery Wagner on July 18, 1863. This action witnessed by a large number of reporters helped to establish in the popular press and in opinion circles in the North that African-American soldiers could and would fight in a large-scale military operation.

Williams knows the history of black and white photography (in both senses). He is schooled in the history of American landscape photography, from Timothy O’Sullivan and Arthur Rothstein to Ansel Adams and Richard Misrach. He is also aware that few African-American photographers have focused on landscape rather than people. It is neither their ancestral land nor one of their choosing. In some states African-Americans were forbidden to own property, and in many they were unlikely to receive loans. It is not a history to inspire an association with the land.

The initial reaction to this body of photographs is the question of why we should care about the places Williams pictures. They are ordinary, unexceptional. Even the monuments he records have no particular grandeur. They are rather like the memorials to some unknown war that one ignores in the local post office or park. But Williams wants us to know that African-Americans’ bravery and ultimate sacrifices are behind our everyday lives. Their stories have not been told. Not until now. William Earle Williams gives us a fuller picture of our history, our land and ourselves.

The exhibition Unsung Heros; African American Soldiers in the Civil War will be seen at Light Work, Syracuse, NY from January 16 to March 16, 2007 before beginning a two-year national tour that ends at the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University in 2009. It will be shown at the Cantor-Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College from September 28 to October 28, 2007. A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

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