At first glance, William Earle Williams' photograph "Earthworks, Fort Pillow, Tennessee, 1999" portrays a typical encounter with nature.
Depicting a ditch scattered with autumn leaves, its off-center composition gives viewers the sense of having stumbled into a peaceful forest enclave-an impression that completely belies the fact that one is looking at a former mass grave.
The text displayed next to the photograph reveals that the unassuming ditch was a depository for the massacred bodies of surrendering black soldiers at Fort Pillow, a particularly tragic and oft-unmentioned event of the Civil War. "Earthworks," with its historically fraught landscape, is typical of the works displayed in Williams' exhibition Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War at the Center for Documentary Studies.
Inspired by what he felt was an under-representation of black soldiers' contributions to the war, Williams started Unsung Heroes with the intent of integrating black participation and sacrifice into the dominant historical narrative.
"Just as monuments symbolize an imperative to remember, Williams' photographs serve to restore forgotten or unmaintained sites to our national memory," wrote Laura Guth, assistant director of Light Work in Syracuse, N.Y., where the exhibition was first staged.
Much of the photographs' power derives from the fact that the places are not officially memorialized. Often the images are of aesthetically appealing but seemingly unremarkable landscapes.
"I'm interested in what remains," Williams said. "And what remains is for the most part what is very much around us. The places are not unique, they're very vernacular. Because they're everyday places... it's an explanation of why we have forgotten, why we haven't appreciated the dynamics of our history and our culture."
Explanatory texts displayed next to each photograph are a important element of the exhibit. For example, "Forks of the Road, Natchez, Mississippi, 2003" captures a deserted country road, marked by a lone street sign framed prominently in the foreground. In the background rests an abandoned white pickup truck. The scene, which exemplifies Williams' concept of a vernacular space, is enhanced by the knowledge that the site once housed the South's second-largest slave market. Viewed with this information, the photograph becomes an effective commentary on the nature of historical memory.
"People want to forget, they don't want to remember about the slave market, so after two or three generations the memory of that is forgotten," he said. "So there it is, it's just a crossroads and there's an abandoned truck there. And that's it!"
Williams himself even had trouble locating the site because it was so commonplace.
"I went by it like 10 or 15 times, because I thought that it would be something bigger or that I would notice it," he said. "I kept going by this little juncture because I was looking for something bigger.... And that's how it is with a lot of these sites. I spend a lot of time being lost."
Williams' photographs are remarkable for their visceral and spatial engagement with the viewer. An example of this is visible in "Village Square, Christiana, Pennsylvania, 1998." The image focuses on a tree trunk, the more conventionally important historical marker and building receding into the background.
"If you're photographing something, why would you organize your picture around a tree trunk?" Williams said. "And the reason is that... it's right where it should be if you are looking at the space as it was inhabited by the people back then.
This artistic technique, reframing current visual space in a way that evokes its past appearance, is one that Williams often uses in his photographs.
"One of the great privileges that you have as an artist... is to interpret a space as it looks today but give a sense of what it might have been, what it could have been in the past," he said.
Wiliams' photographs are notable for documenting long-concealed historical spaces, but they are perhaps most relevant in their ability to inspire viewers to question historical narratives.
"My hope would be that people would be stimulated by this and go do their own investigation," said Courtney Reid-Eaton, exhibitions director at CDS. "[I hope] this show is not an encyclopedia but a catalyst for people to experience it for themselves."
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