A Link to Time: Photographing Lost Battlefields

Last April, to coincide with the start of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, Time magazine ran a photo essay “Why They Fight: Civil War Re-enactors and the Battle Over Historic Sites.” Photographer Gregg Segal took portraits of re-enactors posing on “lost” Civil War battlefields. “In these photographs, the reenactors themselves are all that’s left of the past,” Segal says in his commentary.

The photo essay, passed along to us today by one of our readers, offers a thought-provoking way of looking at battlefields lost to development, and it offers a thought-provoking way of looking at re-enactors, too. In that spirit, we thought we’d pass the link along.

There’s a 6:45-minute video, featuring Segal’s commentary, that goes with the photo essay.