Mechanicsville, Virginia 1865

Curator: Gazing upon this scene by John Reekie, created in 1865, an image simply titled, “Mechanicsville, Virginia,”… there’s an immediate sense of…desolation? Or perhaps profound quiet. Editor: The quiet feels very intentional. I notice first the incredible detail achieved through the albumen print. Look at the texture of the wooden buildings, how the light reflects! This was a painstaking, hands-on process. The image itself feels like a document, not just a landscape, and of the labor it took to make it, both physically for the artist and photographically in a community affected by war. Curator: A document indeed. The eye travels down the worn path. Those simple structures, the scattering of trees, it's as if the land itself is whispering stories of upheaval. I almost feel as though time has stopped. I see something eternal, in a strange way, it’s a landscape of enduring peace. Editor: I think that path leads somewhere, but the final product conceals so much. There's a visible infrastructure of the physical world—the making of this image as a commercial artifact and in Mechanicsville in 1865 as a physical site, itself under construction following the war. So the visible, picturesque desolation we see hides layers of material making. Curator: Yes! It's haunting, isn’t it, how something can appear so straightforward, a simple snapshot of a place, yet hold such depth. The shadow gives everything a feeling of a dream in a memory. Reekie clearly captured a historical location here through such evocative use of composition. Editor: It reminds me how photography itself was tied to the social fabric, not simply a medium, or capturing memories but the tools, process, and physical creation of making a single image involved materials, and commerce, making it inherently a piece of social commentary on material circumstance in an industrializing America, itself being reconstructed. Curator: To be a silent witness frozen in time is like finding truth and finding a universal human emotion that reaches us here now. Editor: A material truth made physical through the alchemy of chemistry and human ingenuity—bound within the context of time and history. Thank you for showing a path toward looking beneath the surface.