| |
 |
| © Dave Black |
| "For me, this wasn't a mournful place. I felt pride," says Dave Black, who shot at midnight on July 4, 2006. Click photo for more images from Arlington National Cemetery. |
The idea of a cemetery carries with it many meanings for us.
It is a place in which sorrow and loss collide with devotion and purpose. The very concept of a national cemetery conveys a sense of shared understanding, a culture that defines itself by commonality rather than division.
The nation was never more divided than when Arlington National Cemetery was created. It was born of necessity and hope -- the necessity being the great numbers of Civil War dead who needed to be interred; the hope being that the transformative power of the cemetery could help heal the country's rift. In 1864, U.S. Army quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed building a cemetery on 200 acres of land in Arlington, Virginia, that once, before the war, had belonged to the family of Robert E. Lee. Like another great cemetery created during the Civil War -- the one at the site of the battle of Gettysburg -- its design grew out of the 19th-century rural cemetery movement, which aimed to bury the dead in lovely, carefully designed landscapes. These new cemeteries would be places where the living could walk with grace among the dead while communing with nature and its implications of rebirth. As Gary Wills points out in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, the transcendentalist movement "played an important role in the cult of cemeteries as 'schools of life.'" Cemeteries like Arlington aimed to be tangible, visible examples of our highest values.
In a sense, the photographs of Arlington National Cemetery seen here are meant to do the same. They are emblems, or can be seen as such. They stand for something, as the ceremonies and military honors at Arlington stand for something. "When I stood there looking out at all those graves, I felt like, here I am doing what I'm doing today, exactly what I want to be doing, because of these people," says Dave Black, one of the people who photographed Arlington for Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery (Rich Clarkson Associates/National Geographic Books, $30). Also featured in the book is work by David Burnett, James Balog, Bruce Dale, David Alan Harvey, and Brian Lanker, each of whom has looked at Arlington in a different way, employing different techniques to capture a common ground. For this special issue, we asked each of the photographers to tell us how they approached the subject, and how the work affected them.
Heroes come from all walks of life, of course, not just from military struggles. And our war dead are buried in all corners of the country, not just in Arlington. But Arlington is where we look for the meaning behind the death. In these pictures, the meaning starts to become visible.
BRUCE DALE
 |
| © Bruce Dale |
| Dale titles this image "The Injured Angel." |
An Elegiac View Memorably Captured Using Invisible "Light"
A National Geographic photographer for 30 years, Bruce Dale has taken pictures in more than 75 countries. Until last fall, however, Dale, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, had never taken pictures inside the national cemetery there.
Dale's assignment was to capture the vibrant fall colors that transform the cemetery into a virtual painter's canvas. But at the last minute he decided to experiment and take along a Nikon D80 digital SLR retrofitted to capture infrared radiation. "I'd been shooting infrared off and on over the years," he says, "and I just had a feeling it might work out for this project."
His hunch paid off. "The infrared seemed to capture something unintended," says Dale. "It was like I was photographing these lost souls, these people who once were visible to us but aren't anymore. And you're photographing them with the light you can't see with your eyes. So it gives the pictures an otherworldly feeling."
The technique worked especially well when Dale photographed what he calls the "injured angel," a monument in one of the older sections of the cemetery. In infrared, the angel becomes something close to an apparition. Dale shot with his Nikon D80 and a 35mm PC-Nikkor lens. "Though I live right in Arlington, I never went to the cemetery much," says Dale. "But after I was done shooting, I continued to go back. You find surprising things, like five sailors who died on the same day. You see that, and you wonder what the story is behind it."
DAVID BURNETT
 |
| © David Burnett |
| The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. |
Searching for the Extraordinary in a Controlled Environment
When David Burnett headed out to Arlington on Memorial Day of 2006 to shoot the annual ceremony in which the president lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he came equipped not only with a digital SLR but also a vintage Speed Graphic. For the past three years, he has used the 4x5 camera to cover stories such as the 2004 presidential campaign, the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "It allows me to be a bit more expressive as a photographer when shooting events that we have all seen before," he says.
His shot of President Bush shows just how expressive he can be. "It's the optics of the big camera that intrigue me," he says. "A normal lens for 4x5 is three times longer than it is for 35mm, so you get much shallower depth of field but without the usual telephoto perspective. One of the problems I find with digital SLRs is that they tend to make everything sharp." The 4x5 camera also allows him to play with swings and tilts to throw specific areas of the image out of focus.
"When you walk into Arlington, you're struck by the magnitude of the place, with thousands and thousands of headstones stretching off into the distance," says Burnett. "It's not a place you can walk around in while in a chatty mood. No matter what your feelings about war in general, you feel real empathy for the people who are coming home to this place."
|
