AKG (Americans Kill Ghosts)

AKG

Getting to Peddocks Island was never a given.  It always has taken a fair amount of planning, research and coordination to get there especially since I moved to Worcester. Buses, trains and even humping my way on foot have been a standard part of any mission I have undertaken.  The boats to the island have been the most unreliable part of the journey at times.  This was never more true than on my first visit of the summer in 2007.  I had all of my contingencies covered including having called the office of the company which ran the island ferries to make sure that I would indeed be able to get there.  This time I got as far as Georges Island, the main terminus for boats to the Harbor Islands before I discovered that despite what I had been told Peddocks Island was in fact not open to the public on that day. 

When I received the news that the island was closed I was beside myself. I was angry beyond words that I had made the arduous trip all the way to Boston only to be denied a short distance from my ultimate goal.  To make matters even worse I would now be stuck at Georges Island and Fort Warren which even by that early date had been reduced to an overcrowded morass teeming with youth groups, tourists and, worst of all, corporate team building outings. It would be nearly impossible to achieve the separation I needed to successfully commune with the fort in a way that was conducive to taking my best photographs.

I attempted to make the best of the aggravating turn events by seeking out things to photograph at Fort Warren before the inevitable wave of obliviousness washed over the island. I headed toward Bastion A of the old  granite Civil War fort.  It was a large open space with vaulted ceilings that I used to refer to as "Dracula's Castle" for its similarity to scenes from Todd Browning's famous horror film.  Ironically in one of many odd coincidences that occurred during my time on the islands I came to find that it had served as a movie theater for the troops stationed there during World War II.  When I arrived at the bastion there was a ghostly fog inhabiting the vast room giving it a more otherworldly feel than it even normally had.  I thought at least I would get some sense of the ethereal history that I had hoped for when I set out.  Soon my idyll was shattered when group after group of screaming kids descended on the bastion running aimlessly through it's echoing corridors. Not only was the mood utterly destroyed but the swarming masses of kids running around had dispersed the fog ruining any semblance of a dreamlike air.  My frustration reached a boiling point when I was shooting a long exposure in a darkened corner when a group of knucklehead teenagers came by waving bright flashlights all through the composition. Things had gone from evocative to exasperating in the space of 15 minutes.

In my previous years of travels around the islands I had imagined myself as being invisible to the blithely unaware day trippers whom I encountered.  I really almost believed nobody would notice me if I stayed quiet and to myself while photographing places that nobody seemed think had any redeeming historical significance.  So I exited the swirling mass of howling young uns with this in mind and started to make my way, hopefully, to some quieter corner of the island.  As I walked from the darkness of the fort I encountered two very pretty young black girls who clearly did not perceive my imagined invisibility.  They asked me if I was taking pictures.  They seemed quite sweet and interested in what I was doing as opposed to the loud, intrusive mob I had just left behind. 

As I got to talking to them one of the girls was particularly interested in the lore of the islands and asked me if I had seen The Lady In Black.  This was allegedly the ghost of the wife of a Confederate spy who had been hanged at the fort.  According to the legend she still roamed the halls of the ancient fortress.  I said I had not, but was familiar with the story. I mentioned how I would certainly entertain such an encounter should it have happened.  She then went to explain about more "ladies" who haunted the other numerous military installations that once occupied the islands. She referred to a Lady In Red who supposedly held forth at Fort Strong on Long Island a short distance away.

Then she came to the part about a ghost who roamed Peddocks Island and the dilapidated remnants of Fort Andrews, my desired destination and the epicenter of my work up to that point.

She claimed that there was a spirit wandering the fort's large and crumbling brick barracks named The Lady In White (for distinctly masculine locations it seems there were a lot of colorful and tragic female figures involved with these places). She told me the tale of a talented young woman who had fallen in love with one of the officers stationed at the post during World War II.  She was a singer who had frequently entertained the boys as they trained in preparation for embarkation to the great conflagration raging in Europe.  The officer supposedly didn't think it wise to commit to such a liberated soul and instead jilted her for another more refined young lady who was purportedly more suitable for his standing. One night after having been rejected by the young lieutenant she was playing piano and singing for the enlisted men in one of barracks.  As the story went after serenading the attentive audience she was consumed by the despair of unrequited love and leapt to her death from a third story window. After the fort was abandoned by the army at the war's end all of the buildings were sealed and hoarding fastened to all of the windows.  Except that the window from which she jumped kept having the boards covering it knocked off.  It was impossible to keep them in place as each time crews reattached them they would be found lying on the ground the next day. 

The thing that stopped me in my tracks about her account was not the eerily tragic account of spurned loved followed by terrible tragedy, but it was that I had a narrative in mind while I photographed the among the ruins there.  It concerned  a young officer who had stepped outside of his rigid, unquestioning military approach to life and had followed his heart, falling in love with a beautiful, creative young woman. In my backstory she was an artist who was unlike anyone he was accustomed to being with ever before. My version of events had it that he had forsaken her for expediency and devoted his attention to another girl for whom he did not feel the same passion but was the daughter of his commanding officer.  In that moment he had abandoned his soul for the straight and narrow life of self denial, a pattern that would repeat itself throughout his life and lead to his own unfulfilled downfall.  The first of many tragedies that would play out over the years was the death by her own hand of the irreparably saddened free spirit whom he had denied. 

The similarities in her fanciful tale and my imagined narrative were stunning.  I had never told anyone of my story and I had never heard about any Lady In White before despite extensively researching all aspects of the island's history.   

The two girls who had almost seemed to have emerged from another time that day went on their way and I never saw them again despite keeping a lookout on many visits to Georges Island that followed. I was left to wonder what strange narrative I had crossed paths with and which I had imagined so vividly.

Before my encounter with the girls I had manged to get into one of the badly deteriorating barracks buildings on Peddocks.  I dropped down into the basement of the structure to gain access and frighteningly found myself nearly trapped inside as getting out the way I got in proved nearly impossible.  A couple of years later, after my conversation with the two girls had occurred, I related the story of my experience of being trapped in the barracks to the uncle and nephew who ran the water taxi to Peddocks. I told them how I couldn't explore beyond the basement of the building because the stairs were impassable due to being burnt out.  They claimed it was possible to climb them, but it was extremely treacherous due to their condition.  They said it was too bad I didn't make the attempt because there was something worth seeing on the third floor.  It was a piano.

Always Clear The Building

Discovery

Back in 2011, on dull grey October morning I traveled to one of my favorite locations, Fort Wetherill in Jamestown, Rhode Island.  There was something strangely detached about the way I was feeling as I tried get beyond the normal perception of reality and immerse myself in the timeless flow of history and quietly hostile nature that coursed through the derelict defenses.  My first destination was Battery Varnum which I had visited numerous times since I first came upon the imposing concrete coast artillery emplacement that I initially referred to as "Cosmoliner* Heaven" a few years before. It stands alone separate from the sprawling main gun line of the rest of the fort on a distinctively shaped formation once known as "The Dumpling" for its compact mound-like appearance.  It had been the fortified in one fashion or another dating back to pre-Revolutionary times as it was advantageously situated over the entrance to Newport Harbor. The existing battery was the first to be completed of the Endicott-Taft period reinforced concrete batteries that stretch across the 100 foot high cliffs overlooking the harbor. 

Generally I make a point of "clearing the building" making sure to check all the rooms for the presence of anything (or anyone) unexpected.  On this occasion however I became complacent since my surroundings were so familiar.  I eschewed my standard operating procedure and ignored the usual search.  As I ventured down the long shadowy corridor that spans the battery I half stumbled across an unanticipated protrusion in the floor.  When I shined my flashlight on the object I tripped over I was stunned to see that it was the body of an opossum.  I noticed further that it appeared to have been the victim of some sort of attack as there were numerous stab wounds in the unfortunate creature's abdomen.  A fairly fresh trail of blood led to one of the magazine rooms off to the side of the main corridor.  At the end of the blood trail was a sizable puddle of blood with a fish scaling knife lying nearby.  This heinous act had not occurred all that long before my arrival, possibly as recently as the night before. It was a shocking revelation that snapped me out of my lackadaisical state. I immediately assumed a full defensive posture and cautiously inspected the entire battery, checking each blackened magazine thoroughly to make sure the perpetrator was not still lurking about somewhere.  After making this grisly discovery I stepped outside into the deserted alleyway that separates the ordinance rooms from what had been the power plant and plotting rooms of the battery complex to gather my thoughts.  

The only sound in the vacant alley was that of a white plastic bag fluttering like a flag of surrender as it was entangled in the overgrown shell absorbing earthworks covering the roofs of the structure.  I felt like I had been selected to be a solitary witness and that as disturbing as my find had been my first obligation was to go back in order to document what I had literally stumbled upon to somehow provide some context.  It was, after all, an element of the unconventional narrative that I was a part of that day and not unlike that which I had experienced throughout my explorations of the Coast Artillery positions. There was a cold-blooded viciousness to the act that repelled me while at the same time compelled me to confront and  somehow rationalize it in relation to that tale of endless war and indifferent nature. I went back and shot the video posted above seeing it as a curiously juxtaposed extension of a scene I had shot that summer in a bunker at Fort Standish in Boston Harbor.  In that video the unseen narrator leads the viewer on a tour of a long abandoned bunker to the darkened ammo room where he indicates the saga of his tragic wartime experiences began.  When I emerged from shooting the current scene of the crime a flock of hundreds of birds swooped and swirled over the battery almost as if the madness of the moment had possessed them and driven them to a squawking mass frenzy.  

Later in the same day I journeyed over to Fort Adams across the channel in Newport.  I was disappointed to find that all of the gun positions had been sealed to the public, but I did come across what had been the fort's cemetery.  As I wandered among the ancient headstones of soldiers who died from maladies and fevers while posted at the fort the headstones shifted unexpectedly from those of fallen warriors to those of babies. They were the soldiers' offspring who had succumbed to the high rates of infant mortality that plagued the world of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Under the inscrutable gaze of a bronze bust of John Adams, who had once described his namesake fortress as "the rock against which the storm shall break", row after row of grave markers simply proclaimed "Baby", "Baby"...  

And so went my expedition into the greyness of one October day in the murky shadows of history.

*Cosmoliner was term for Coast Artillery Corps soldiers as they were constantly covered with the petroleum gel, cosmoline that was used to rust proof the guns they serviced. 

The Lost Year and The Commando Raid

It's been quite a while since I've done a post obviously.  Without going into long and tedious detail about the circumstances that knocked me out of action, I will just say that it was year that began with my camera getting smashed and went on to feature far too much involvement with my aging and highly dysfunctional family.  'Nuff said.

One photo "mission" (as I call my shoots) that may have been a turning point, at least in my own outlook, was a visit to the former West Reservation of Fort Greene and Battery 109.  It is located in what is now known as Fishermen's State Park in Narragansett Rhode Island.  When I had gone there in December 2012 I found that the bunker had been fenced off and that a good deal of the vegetation that had enshrouded it was being removed.  I was still able to gain entry though because I happened to notice one of the gates was left unlocked and there was no one around on frigid grey afternoon.  In January I returned with a sense that this might be the last time I would have personal unrestricted access to the unrestored battery. 

Battery 109 is a Series 100 bunker built during World War II to house two 16 inch guns - the largest guns in the U.S. inventory that were similar to those mounted on the top of the line battleships in service at the time.  These bunkers are massive earth covered concrete structures some 600 feet long and at least 35 feet high.  Battery 109 was never armed as by the time it was completed the threat from a coastal engagementwith large surface ships had long passed.  Now it stands vacant in the middle of a summertime tourist encampment surrounded by Winnebagos and trailers.  God knows what "They" are going to with it now that it has caught the interest of the authorities.

When I arrived at the park I discovered that not only had the bunker remained fenced off, but that there was a state work crew with a park ranger in tow doing something or other with huge cutting wheel in the rear of Gun Emplacement 2.  Though one can usually gain entry to these locations without too much trouble it is a good idea to exercise discretion when attempting to do so.  Battery109 is posted as "State Property - No Tresspassing!" after all.  So, with that in mind,  I was forced to climb the battery and traverse the length of it to see if somehow I could get in through Emplacement 1 at the far end.  I was able to slip behind the fencing from the top of the bunker in proceed down the slope and over the concrete retaining wall at Gun Emplacement 1.  From that end of the long corridor that connects the gun positions I was able to see that the crew was not actually working inside the emplacement, but were outside at the entrance. 

This is when one of those strange epiphanies or realizations that have been so much a part of this work came to me.  Over the course of time my own appearance while photographing had transformed.  I had gradually adopted more and more genuine, contemporary Army gear including a full camo uniform mostly out of these items' genuine usefulness for doing this kind of work.  (The rugged ACUs - Army Combat Uniforms - are really good for crawling around the sometimes inhospitable terrain around the various abandoned structures and the "Camelbak" water supply system that fits into one's backpack is a godsend!)

It occurred to me that as I had become outfitted in "full battle rattle" with uniform, black watch cap, tactical flashlight and three day assault pack, etc.,  that I could sneak, commando-like, down the dark corridor and into the power and ventilation rooms I was interested in shooting located in the center of the battery.   That particular moment of personal involvement, of stepping out from behind the camera and becoming like a character in my own own story at that particular time, led me to take the ultimate step towards full immersion in this project.  I would become a character who is the embodiment of these kinds of places, of the years of lies and violence that gave birth to what we have become today.

The mission that I later named "Operation Landlord" was an exhilarating success.  The next time out I would introduce "Mr. Skin" to the world.

Stay tuned, cosmoliners...

Welcome!

Welcome to the first post on my new edsel addams speaks blog.  In the coming weeks I'm looking forward to sharing some descriptions and background stories about my photographic work on the project, Cosmoliner. 

I believe this blog will add a compelling dimension to my photographs by helping to shed some light on  the circumstances surrounding their creation.  Over the past ten years there have been many strangely ironic occurrences and fascinating adventures while exploring and photographing the remaining Coast Artillery Corps fortifications - those ignominious artifacts of the last World War and our not-so-distant violent past.
  
I hope you will enjoy hearing about these experiences and check back frequently as well as visiting my website, donfeeney.com.