Statement for Fragments from the Book of War

Peter Smyth
Statement for “Fragments from the Book of War”
My father was born in 1912 (the year the Titanic went down). The ninth of ten children he grew up on the edge of the city in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia in a huge 3-story Victorian mansion. He would often tell us stories about how as a boy he would steal watermelons from a nearby farm (now the grounds of Lankenau Hospital). Every Sunday, without fail, my family - my parents, my older brother and sister and I - would go to my grandparents’ house for dinner along with my many uncles, aunts, and cousins. As a small child I remember being fascinated by that house. I would often go off on my own to explore its many rooms, most of which were completely empty since my grandparents, now in their nineties, lived there alone. But most of all, I wanted to know about the mysterious 3rd floor, a place no one ever went. Acknowledging my curiosity, my father once took me on a tour.
With the help of a small stepladder, you could pull down a set of wooden steps from the ceiling and ascend to the abandoned rooms above. This was where my father had slept as a child, a part of the house that was unheated. Whenever I would go there, it always felt as if I was entering some forgotten world of the past. Gaslight fixtures (now disconnected) were still mounted on the walls in the hallway and in the empty bedrooms. Many personal possessions, artifacts of this earlier time, still lay scattered about, left behind on dusty floors or table tops or high chests of drawers. But one object in particular caught my eye – it was a book of photographs commemorating a long-ago war: a pictorial history of the First World War. I was fascinated by the hundreds of sepia-toned photographs I found inside. It truly captured my imagination. As the years passed, I would return again and again, to spend hours alone in this deserted place to page through that strange book of a long-ago war. A war that my father’s older brothers had been part of.
Decades later, after my grandparents had passed away and the house had been sold, I was aware that the book had remained in my father’s possession and that coming to the end of his life he wanted me to have it. I eagerly took him up on his offer; however, it lay tucked way at the bottom of a bookshelf in my studio, untouched literally for decades. It was only recently that, out of a sense of curiosity and perhaps nostalgia, I once again decided to page through it and have a second look. It was startling! Even though I was now so much older, those photos had lost none of their power for me. Because of the strength of that connection, I felt compelled to use them in some way in my practice. I felt a need to express what I saw as the inherent contradiction in a time when war was thought to be both horrifying and noble.
In order to preserve the many fleeting impressions (a lifetime of psychic fragments) I had gathered from the book, I decided to combine these antique images in a new way, one that was both abstract, surreal, and visually striking: a far cry from the stiff and formal tone presented by its original authors. I wanted to extract the terrifying strangeness of the stories they told and, in some way, to capture the emotion hidden behind the pictures. Appropriation was not something I’d ever considered or that even interested me, and yet in this case, I sensed that part of my attraction to this book was about photography itself. It felt like an opportunity to show what can happen in the translation between the source of a work, its inspiration, and the finished work itself, how different the end result can be. For that reason, I couldn’t resist. Visually, some of the pieces appear print-like, while others are more painterly. The kind of vivid transparent colors displayed in this series are a throwback to this same time period in my childhood. When I was very young there was no color photography per se. At the time, to earn a little extra money my mother (being an artist) would sometimes hand-tint black and white photos for pay. As a small boy I distinctly remember watching her, fascinated by this process. I suspect that this may have been the origin of my love for the idea of the combining of painting and photography.
I would feel remiss if, along with this intensely colorful series of digital collage photos, I did not include the 110-year-old book itself as a reference point and source (both personal and historic) informing these works. It would be displayed on a tall rough hand-made table and vintage proofreaders stand: circa “the War to End All Wars” the centerpiece of the presentation inviting the spectators to leaf through its pages, just as I had as a child. To this I would add a red ribbon-bookmark symbolizing the passion of this war and the blood that had been shed in the hope that it might serve as a remembrance of the terrible price of conflict. I believe that the presence of the actual book would add so much to the experience, one that seems all the more timely in light of the ongoing tragedies of war, the awful carnage and grief we are even now witness to on a daily basis. Surely, it is a distant mirror to the events that we currently see unfolding. It is my sincere hope that these images might in some way help to raise our awareness of the real meaning and cost of war in terms of human suffering.