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. 

New! Endless War

Blood In The Water

My journey through the ruins of World War II has taken me to many unexpected and unusual places both physical and metaphysical.  No journey has been more transformative though than that which found me emerging from behind the camera to appear as the subject(s) of my photographs. This through-the-lens progression started innocently enough with my adopting more and more actual military gear as the clothing and equipment I used while photographing out of practicality.  I had written about this a while back in an earlier post entitled, The Lost Year and the Commando Raid.  I then started to portray a solitary figure as a result of an aborted project a friend of mine had wanted to do involving an armed hooded figure.  I liked the idea and decided to try to do it myself.  I had not been accustomed to photographing the figure at the time so it was an interesting challenge to pursue. I did a small series based on this concept, but soon was confronted with the limits of  constantly depicting a single individual.  Some time passed where I was not inspired do any figurative work, but concentrated instead on a series based on projecting images in the rooms of the bunkers.  I still like to incorporate this device into my latest work at times.

Last Fall I decided to once again attempt to re-approach the beast I had known as Photoshop for a third time.  My two previous forays with the program were fraught with confusion and frustration, but I knew I had overcome this in order to take my work to a higher level as I am always striving to do,  This time I broke through the barriers that previously existed and came to grips with the demon. It enabled me to expand my vision in the direction I had first conceived when I started taking pictures which was to photographically create the kinds of scenes that I had done using found images and painted backgrounds.  This caused me to change the way that I worked immensely.  I can now populate my scenes with multiple characters.  I no longer rely on happenstance in a stream of consciousness kind of way, but rather I approach creating each scene more like shooting a movie. There is an entirely new set of demands both visually and physically that must be accommodated. For one thing, whereas before the idea was to infiltrate and flow with the nature of the location, now each scene has to be "scripted" and performed, as it were, and then extensively edited to make it visually compelling.  I still rely greatly on the spectacular natural light found in the forts, but I have also started to augment it with the use of a flash at times.  I have also now discovered the virtues of cloudy weather for its wonderfully even light and ominous feel.  In the past I would seek out the sunniest days to infuse the structures with the most vibrant, lurid color.  All of this I feel has reinvigorated my work and opened unlimited possibilities. 

The culmination of this transformation is now available for viewing in a new portfolio entitled, Endless War.  You can view and purchase these new images at my website: www.donfeeney.com and on my Facebook page,  All of the images on my website are available and are custom printed in various sizes from 4" x 6" up to /16" x 24".  You can also view and follow the photos on Instagram. Please contact me at donfeeney@donfeeney.com if you have any questions or requests.

Update: You can now purchase beautiful 13" x 19" prints of  my new portfolio, Endless War, at my new shop at www.facebook.com/donfeeneyphotography/

A Ghost Is Born

Wilkommen

This past Spring I had the good fortune to, by chance, visit Fort Burnside in Jamestown, Rhode Island.  I had not made an excursion to there since the infamous day 3 years before when my camera was smashed at Fort Wetherill by a gust of wind.  On past missions I have felt at times there was some sense of a premonition about exploring a particular location and this was the case in this instance.  I was rewarded for my curiosity when I discovered Battery 213 - formerly a Series 200 6 inch gun battery - was open and accessible. This was especially a thrill for a bunker enthusiast like myself as it represented the first such emplacement I had gained entry to in all my years of "bunker diving" as I call it. (I can hear the gasps of envy from here.)  These were World War II era designs that were the smaller caliber brothers to the massive Series 100 16" inch gun battery casemates of the renowned 1940 Modernisation Program of Harbor Defenses.  Once inside I quickly discovered that the town had been using the bunker for some sort of fire training. The walls were blackened by smoke and had been drenched by fire hoses which caused the black soot to drip down the fading yellow concrete walls. The hoses were strewn across the floors and some shell rooms were packed with hay and wooden palettes in preparation for the next conflagration. The interior rooms which comprised the former command center for the battery had been arranged like an apartment with musty, waterlogged old furniture, I suppose to train firemen on navigating a smoky environment in a fire. The dampness and years of fires made the bunker smell rancid, charred and dank.  Altogether there was feeling of the place being haunted by some distant tragedy, an odd sensation as the battery was never remotely in combat.  But like all the World War II era emplacements I've visited there is an aura of that colossal tragedy that pervades them.  I've never encountered a ghost in my travels and because of that I don't put much stock in such things, but this place certainly felt like it was somewhere one could.

I had recently acquired a Sony Handycam video camera that had the added feature of possessing a very nice projector that could project either videos or images on the camera with great clarity. While preparing for this particular mission I had, as it would turn out, ironically chosen the general theme of children in war.  The command center turned apartment offered me the opportunity to project an image into total darkness from a doorway in the entrance corridor. I chose an image of a young cabin boy aboard the ill fated German liner, Wilhelm Gustloff as my first experiment. What occurred was extraordinary and was almost like bringing a ghost to life.  The image did not distort against the irregular background of decrepit furnishings, but instead hung in the midst of the room like a spectre.  It was as though the vague imaginings I had of a haunted, tragic place were given a plaintive face beckoning from another time. 

In the photograph shown above I added some very basic flash (keeping it raw) that I bounced off the overhead thus illuminating the details of the "apartment" while preserving the ethereal quality of the projected image.

I was able to make three separate forays to the location in the Spring, but in case one were inclined to make a trip down to see Battery 213 it is currently resealed by the forces of oppression and the Town of Jamestown.  On my final visit in September of last year the iron grates over the entrances had been returned to their hinges once again securing the ghosts of Battery 213 from public view.

The Summer Campaign

Somewhere in the woods...

Welcome back. During these short, bleak days of December there's no better time to cast one's memory back to the events of warmer, sunnier times...like the invasion of Europe.

This past summer I was able to get to my favorite location and the seminal epicenter of this entire project, Peddocks Island and the (dwindling) remains of Fort Andrews on four fun'n'sun-filled occasions.   As recently as 2009 this place was a (somewhat) intact Army installation last used during World War II. Ironically its last use by the Army was as an Italian POW camp, though it is most widely known as the place where the 2010 Martin Scorsese movie, Shutter Island, was vaguely  purported to have taken place.  When I first discovered the fort by chance during the summer of 2001 I could not believe what an incredible find it was - an entire World War II era,  MGM back lot-style location was essentially at my disposal.  Now,  the "authorities" have stepped in and ruined things as always.  Most of the magnificently crumbling quarters and support buildings have been razed while the remaining ones have been sealed up.  Near the 6" and 3" gun batteries, in an area I used to call "The Bocage" after the Normandy battle zone because of its thick overarching vegetation,  there are now fucking things called "yurts".  World War Wonderland has vanished for all practical purposes.  America successfully buries its past once again.  Start busing in the slack-jawed tourists who have "never seen a seagull before", the bad music thumping through the wilderness from the flotilla of cruise boats and, of course the spray paint.

However there are still intriguing places to be found by those willing to pay the price where the modern age has not wiped out the last flickers of history and imagination.  Deep in the woods are located the remains of two fire control structures, one accepted into service on D-Day, 1944 and the other from World War I which is made from that wonder product of the age, cemestos .  There are also the ruins of a dormitory and one of the first radio stations in the Army - more on this in a later post.  Their existence is owed to the fact that they are virtually uncharted and are so overgrown that one can literally be 20 feet away and not see them.  Did I mention that one must go through a sea of poison ivy and deep waves of incredibly tough vines whose only purpose in nature is seemingly to produce huge thorns?  Now that I've told everyone exactly where it is I can finally reveal that this is where I love to spend my summer vacation.  The concrete WWII bunker-like structure which I had located last year after numerous attempts was my base of operations.  (It also makes for a great place to watch birds from, but better bring a bucket of DEET, those mosquitoes are hungry!) As a testament to just how isolated it is it, there is no graffiti and there is still glass in some of the windows - unheard of features in today's Coast Artillery environment!   From my historic hideaway I would go "on patrol" in search of the the highly elusive radio station and beyond. 

The overall search for these locations occurred over the course of multiple visits to Peddocks and took place over the span of at least four years.  Only after repeated attempts and extensive research of maps, photos and satellite images in addition to learning to use a compass and later a GPS device  - not to mention a machete - I finally took the top of the hill for good this year.   These are the kind of good, hardcore missions, the ones where you're sweaty, sore, banged up, maybe even bleeding a little as well as being visually exhausted by the end of it,  that keep this project going.  

After all, the best pictures are always in the worst places.

P.S. - If you're planning on visiting the bunker next summer please let us know in advance so we can set the Claymores.