Capture of a Hun blockhouse in the Hindenburg Line at Croiselles, wrecked by our artillery preparation after 1916

This stereoscopic image, "Capture of a Hun blockhouse," by Realistic Travels is... intense. It plunges you right into the aftermath of a World War I battle, all in stark monochrome. I'm thinking about what the photographer must have been thinking when they took the shot. It must have been a kind of madness out there in the trenches. Can you imagine hauling equipment through the blasted landscape, dodging the next shell? There’s smoke and rubble everywhere. It is a landscape of barely-controlled chaos. I think about the process of making a photograph: the camera, the glass plate, the chemicals, the printing. And now here we are, over a hundred years later, still looking. Photography allows for a conversation across time.