A Battle is Worth a Thousand Words (intro)

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the old saying goes. When Chris Heisey approached me a few years ago with an idea for a book project, he wanted to match some of his battlefield photography with very specific kinds of words.

Chris has produced some amazing photography over the years. I first saw his work decades ago for the American Battlefield Trust. By his own admission, he dropped off the radar screen for a while, but to Emerging Civil War’s good fortune, in 2020, Chris wanted to get back in the ball game. He had no motive other than to just share his photography. He loves being on battlefields, he loves light, and he loves taking photos, and his generosity of spirit inspires him to want to share his gift.

A couple years ago, Chris approached me once about matching some of his battlefield photos with primary sources related to those battlefields: a soldier account, a civilian diary, a slave narrative. He wanted to share a photo of the battlefield and match it with words from someone who has been there during the war contextualizing his modern view with the view of eyewitness. He invited ECW’s community of writers to gather, edit, and contextualize the primary sources that accompany the photos. It became a wicked cool ECW project.

Unfortunately, the project did not pan out because of cost issues. Full-color glossy books are expensive to produce. We at least had the chance to feature some of his images on the covers of our ECW 10th Anniversary Series, for which I was extremely grateful. I love the way those covers snap. We also feature some of his photos in each of those books, which add a nice touch to kick off each volume.

In the meantime, we have been sitting on a treasure trove of beautiful photos and compelling accounts. ECW secretary Jon-Erik Gilot, who is an archivist in his day job, noticed we had this wonderful collection in the ECW archives and suggested we do something with it on the blog. Chris readily agreed.

Thanks to Chris’s generosity and Jon-Erik’s diligent work formatting the posts, ECW is pleased to kick off an going series we titled “A Battle is Worth a Thousand Words”—a play on the old cliché. The irony is that Chris’s photography often leaves me at a loss for words because his images are so beautiful (a word that, itself, fails to capture the true spirit of Chris’s art).

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If you love Chris’s photography, we have news of a special project he’s working on that you’re going to want to hear about. Details coming soon!