Eloy Urroz: From Boom to Crack, From Mexico to Mount Pleasant

BY ADAM PARKER

Eloy Urroz sure does bounce around.

The big trampoline in his backyard might serve as a symbol for his life and writing career. He jumps on it, leaning this way or that, rising above the accumulated acorns that mimic his moves in miniature, following him across the elastic surface like kernels of thoughts that won’t let go.

Urroz hates symbols. He meticulously avoids them in his fiction. He knows that life is messy, that its trajectory is never certain, that its rewards and disappointments are difficult to predict. He knows that human relationships, whether fostered by brief encounters or long interactions, whether concrete or conceptual, form the main substance of experience.

So that’s what he writes about: complicated, contradictory things. None of his eight novels are symbolic or allegorical. None of them contain what Latin American literature is most famous for: magical realism. They are instead reworkings of real life, explorations of the psyche (his psyche), inquiries into human behavior.

Still, the trampoline functions well as a literary surrogate for Urroz’s career and outlook: he wanders back and forth (in both the landscape of his imagination and the geography of the planet); he examines his subjects from all angles, including from above; he’s not afraid to step on a nut, or take a tumble, or fall on his face; he likes a sweeping vista but mostly focuses on the details and textures of the earthbound. The trampoline affords Urroz an ever-changing, 360-degree perspective.

It keeps him in motion.

Since he was a child growing up in Mexico City, Urroz has been a voracious reader, consuming the world’s classics and Latin America’s “Boom” authors of the 1950s and 60s as if they were the fuel on which his passion and determination depend.

He has no permanent work space, preferring to write all over the house. He sits with his laptop at in the backyard of his Mount Pleasant home, in his office, at the kitchen table, in the den, in the bedroom, in the bathroom. He will not write in coffee shops, but on days when he doesn’t teach he will lounge there to read while his two children, 13-year-old Milena and 9-year-old Nicolas, are in school and his wife Leticia attends classes in psychology at the College of Charleston.

Urroz jumps between his house near Palmetto County Park and The Citadel where he is tenured faculty teaching Spanish language and literature. His career as a student and writer has prompted several relocations, a pattern he inherited from his parents and grandparents, who also tended to cross various borders.

Family history

Urroz was born in New York City, where his father, Eloy Sr., worked as an environmental engineer. His mother, Margot Kanan, was the daughter of Syrian Jews who emigrated from Aleppo to Mexico City (perhaps via the port city of Veracruz) in the early part of the last century, when the capital was a flourishing hive of artistic and intellectual activity. That was the era of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, of heated political debates and extravagant parties.

Urroz does not know everything about his father, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2008, but there are enough clues to construct a scenario (for what else do you expect a novelist to do?): Eloy Sr. dated a girl, the niece of a future Mexican president, got her pregnant, then walked away. Three months after he met Margot the couple married, then moved to New York where Urroz was born.

His father didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, Urroz said. “This is just my conjecture.”

Soon, the family was in Austin, Texas, where Eloy Sr. earned a master’s degree. When Urroz was 2 years old, and his mother was pregnant again, they moved to Mexico to be closer to family. About a decade ago, Urroz met his half-sister. Naturally, this family intrigue has found its way into his fiction.

“I have extraordinary memories of the 1970s and 80s in Mexico City,” Urroz said. “You had everything there — the best restaurants, culture, museums, music. At the same time it was a safe place to live.”

Not like now. Today, the “drug war” has fostered gangs that represent an existential threat to the country. The brutal violence is only the most obvious of woes. Political corruption runs deep. And a once promising economy has faltered badly.

Urroz blames policy makers in both Mexico and the United States who insist on sustaining the so-called war on drugs when better alternatives are evident. And he is not altogether happy about the way drug trafficking has led to a whole new literary genre: narcoliterature. Like magical realism, narcoliterature tends to pigeonhole Latin American fiction.

Urroz’s friend and fellow writer, the estimable Jorge Volpi, calls narcoliterature “a new stereotype.”

“The problem is that an urgent theme is becoming, thanks once again to the need for exoticism in the West, an obligation,” Volpi wrote in a short essay published earlier this year in the journal “Review.”

Keen on the Boom

In middle school, a music teacher would catch Urroz reading fat European novels during class. The teenager’s appetite for books was large and growing — and a little easier to satisfy than his hormone-driven hunger for girls.

In Mexico, a Catholic country, sex was usually hard to come by in the 1980s. Respectable girls waited for marriage. So, when he was 13, Urroz was taken by his friends to a house of ill-repute where he lost his virginity in a ritual that had played out for generations, one he recounted, in somewhat altered form, in his 1996 novel “Las remoras” (“The Obstacles”).

Volpi, Urroz and fellow writer Ignacio Padilla met at the prestigious Marist Brothers high school in Mexico City. The all-male Catholic school was run by teachers who, while members of a religious order, were politically liberal, academically open-minded and not afraid to utter bad words and talk honestly about sex, Urroz said.

While students there, the three friends discovered the Boom writers — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and others who gained worldwide fame and changed the perception of Latin America.

“We wanted to be like them,” Urroz said.

In the late 1980s, the friends banded together with another young man of letters, Alejandro Estivill, and wrote a book called “Variations on a Theme by Faulkner” (Faulkner was an enormous influence on Latin American Boom writers, who revered him, “even more than Hemingway,” Urroz said).

It was a struggle. They disagreed on everything, from plot to adjective, but shouldered through the process, producing a series of related stories, saved on a floppy disk.

For 10 years, the book went missing, until Padilla found it packed away somewhere and distributed copies to his co-authors. Revisiting the stories, they disagreed again. The book was good. It was bad. It succeeded in demonstrating the goals of the new generation. It was nothing but an experimental vanity project run amok.

The novel’s protagonist is a writer who pens short stories, Urroz explained. “He becomes crazy and the stories become his life.”

Urroz printed a copy, stuffed it in an envelope and sent it off under a pseudonym to a Mexican literary contest. Then he and the others forgot about it again.

It won the prestigious Premio Nacional de Cuento San Luis Potosi in 1990.

Crack Movement

It took a while to get the book published. When it finally appeared in 2004, the volume included the “Crack Manifesto” (originally authored in 1996), a repudiation of the formulas, commercialism and sentimentality of the Post-Boom writers.

“We wanted to challenge the reader again,” Urroz said.

The Boomers had rediscovered the power of the comprehensive 19^th century European novel, which contained a whole world of experience and ideas, a giant cast of characters and, often, a sweeping sense of history. In Latin America, this approach, claimed by the Boom writers, was called “novela totalizadora.”

The Crack authors wanted to restore the total novel, to provide “an alternate life experience” in which two dimensions, the real world of the reader and the multilayered fictional world of the novel intertwine, Urroz said.

Their efforts were preceded by another, similar movement called McOndo (which plays on the name of Garcia Marquez’ imaginary village in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”). McOndo writers, too, disliked the reductionist portrayal of Latin America as an exotic land or Banana Republic. They were interested in asserting urban attitudes of multiculturalism and shining a light on poverty, crime and other aspects of modern life.

“ ‘Crack’ suggested a return to a fiction characterized by attention to style, technical experimentation, self-centered narrative, awareness of the genre’s traditional structure and — in an allusion to the Boom tradition — the request for active participation of the readers in deciphering the text,” explained Tomas Regalado, a professor of Spanish-language literature at James Madison University, and a friend and former colleague of Urroz. “At first the Crack Movement was regarded with suspicion by Mexican critics and writers, but in the 21st century it has become a well-known phenomenon that deserved the attention of critics, editors and academic.”
Crack writers, Regalado said, are like the Boomers — academic, informed about the history of literature, cosmopolitan, well-traveled, anti-nationalistic and averse to provincialism.

“The Crack group wanted to return to a Spanish-American tradition of the ‘escritura’ novel, an autonomous literary text that questions reality instead of portraying it,” Regalado said.

Teaching

Urroz, whose favorite writers include D.H. Lawrence and Alberto Moravia, started writing poetry and short stories when he was 12. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic literature from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 1994 (focusing on another of his favorite writers, Vargas Llosa), then pursued masters and doctorate degrees at UCLA.

In 1999, he landed a teaching post at Mesa State College in Colorado, where his daughter Milena was born. A year later he was at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., working with Regalado.

“I had just graduated from college and I was planning to write a doctoral dissertation about Spanish narrative, but Eloy convinced me to write about ‘his friends,’” Regalado said. “Soon afterwards, ‘his friends’ — and Eloy himself — were referential writers within the Latin American field.”

While in Virginia, Urroz’s son Nicolas was born.

In 2006, he moved to Mount Pleasant and assumed his professorship at The Citadel, earning tenure two years later.

Katya Skow-Obenaus, a professor of German at The Citadel, said the foreign language requirement at the school keeps Urroz busy (he teaches four courses a semester). Many students are not aware of their teacher’s literary fame, Skow-Obenaus said.

“I mentioned to a student recently that he was a famous novelist,” she said. “He was very, very shocked.”

But his colleagues know, she said.

“We’re proud of him. He doesn’t just write fiction. He puts out a large amount of scholarly writing as well. … Eloy writes fiction because he’s driven to write fiction; he writes scholarly articles because he really, really loves taking apart literature.”

Even during lunch, when professors assemble after a long morning in the classroom, Urroy wants to discuss something he’s just read, she said. Such discussions, whether in the lunchroom or at someone’s home in the evening, tend to be intense, Skow-Obenaus said.

“It’s a lot of fun. He’s quite erudite, and very, very well read and enthusiastic about what he reads.”

Across time

He even listens to music intensely — classical music mostly, but also good rock and roll.

Currently, Urroz is reading Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven. So he’s decided to enhance the literary experience with an aural one by listening to all of Beethoven’s compositions, in conjunction with the book.

Occasionally he might bounce around between Beethoven and Sibelius or Bach — or The Beatles, or Band of Horses, or Mumford and Sons. But mostly he’ll journey through the musical imagination of “The Big Deaf One.”

Great music, like literature, demands something of the consumer. It requires a melding of sensibilities and experience, an interpretation that takes into account not only what the composer did but what the listener knows.

It is this magical phenomenon, this constant refreshment, that keeps musical and literary masterworks alive forever.

Urroz noted that this collaboration between artist and audience is reciprocal: just as a reader actively plumbs a writer’s intentions, so does the writer scrutinize question the people who comprise his readership, even across time.

“I like to see into people’s souls and minds,” he said.

Bigger than God: Ronald Dworkin describes moral philosophy, makes case for ‘religious atheism’

BY ADAM PARKER

RELIGION WITHOUT GOD. By Ronald Dworkin. Harvard University Press. 180 pages. $17.95.

To be religious is to believe in God, pray, go to church, that sort of thing. At least, that’s the popular conception of religion, which holds that humankind is part of a grand, miraculous and eternal creation, that the divine is discernible and, under the right circumstances, achievable.

Against this notion the secular humanists fight. They argue that there’s no physical or scientific evidence for God, Heaven or Hell, that belief in the supernatural is superstition (or worse) and that religion obviates human agency, leaving an unjustifiable moral loophole permitting the faithful to forego their earthly responsibilities.

Most religious people don’t want to give up their faith, so the arguments of the secularists aren’t likely to make much of a dent. Similarly, most atheists probably won't suddenly subscribe to a religious tradition, so attempts at proselytizing tend to be futile. The two sides, separated by a chasm of misunderstanding, talk right past one another.

Ronald Dworkin, the much-respected legal philosopher who died earlier this year, transformed a lecture into a short book recently published by Harvard University Press called “Religion Without God,” which essentially sidesteps the regular theist vs. atheist debate to argue something altogether original and refreshing: that the religious impulse is (a) widely shared and (b) much bigger than a belief in God.

“Religion is a deep, distinct, and comprehensive worldview: it holds that inherent, objective value permeates everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, that human life has purpose and the universe order,” Dworkin writes in the introduction. “A belief in a god is only one possible manifestation or consequence of that deeper worldview.”

Since that value is independent — religion only serves to reinforce it — a commitment to this underlying objective reality is available to both believers and nonbelievers, Dworkin argues. “So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them, and that shared faith might therefore furnish a basis for improved communication between them.”

Religious people surely experience drudgery, just as atheists are capable of appreciating profound mystery. What they have in common — or should have in common — is a devotion to moral truth.

Convictions of value are the common glue of humanity, Dworkin writes, and this idea is so appealing and so thoughtfully rendered in “Religion Without God,” that it is hard to find any fault with his logic, unless you happen to be a biblical literalist, or a die-hard naturalist who believes there is nothing, not even moral truth, beyond what nature provides, that all else is illusion.

Dworkin does not dismiss religion; he acknowledges that some people will gaze upon the Grand Canyon and attribute its beauty to God. Others will stand at its edge and marvel at the geology. Beauty is not necessarily evidence of the divine, Dworkin writes. Take the Taj Mahal, with its stunning symmetry: its beauty (who would deny it?) is a result of mathematics.

A believer will retort that math itself is a product of God’s divine creation. Fine, says Dworkin. But it is fair to propose that math is self-sufficient, or part of the universal order that transcends religion, needing no deity to legitimize it or deign it with what we might call the sublime.

But is beauty real? Is it our response to what we perceive as divinely inspired or is it a consequence of a different kind of inevitability, perhaps natural or human-caused? It is hard to imagine that Raphael’s “Madonna of the Meadow,” with its triangular composition and luminous coloring, should have been made differently, or that a Bach fugue is the product of chance.

Dworkin thinks that art is great when it conveys this sense of ineluctable destiny, and the idea can be expanded to include all we know. As Einstein said, using a religious metaphor, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”

This inevitability is evidence of something vaster than any particular religion, according to Dworkin, and proof that all people, regardless of affiliation or cultural inheritance, can find common ground. So when he uses the term “religious atheism,” it is no contradiction. For Dworkin, one can be religious — susceptible to the awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe and the beauty that nature and human creativity provide — without believing in what he calls the Sistine God, the bearded figure painted by Michelangelo who, with the touch of his fingertip, made mankind.

“Religion Without God” is a tiny book, only 159 pages of text, that inexorably lays out in lucid terms Dworkin’s moral philosophy. The logical argument he makes is itself an example of the sort of inevitable beauty he describes in chapter two, “The Universe.”

In his chapter on religious freedom (remember, Dworkin was a scholar of the law) he argues that true political liberty depends on ethical independence, which holds that government cannot restrict freedom “just because it assumes that one way for people to live their lives — one idea about what lives are most worth living just in themselves — is intrinsically better than another.”

Ethical independence, therefore, ensures religious freedom (among other things). “It condemns any explicit discrimination or establishment that assumes — as such discrimination invariably does assume — that one variety of religious faith is superior to others in truth or virtue or that a political majority is entitled to favor one faith over others or that atheism is father to immorality.”

The final short chapter is about death and immortality. It was written by a man who knew his time was up. And here, in these last few pages, Dworkin reveals the profound humanism that has informed his life’s work. He believes, tenaciously, that there is objective ethical and moral truth, “a right way to live” that is independent of theistic assumptions, and therefore available to religious atheists.

“What matters most fundamentally to the drive to live well is the conviction that there is, independently and objectively, a right way to live,” he writes. “In this most fundamental respect religious theists and religious atheists are at one. The existence or nonexistence of a god does not figure in the instinct of value that unites them. What divides them is science: they disagree about the best explanation of the truths of matter and mind, but it by no means follows that they disagree about the further truths of value.”

And living well leads to its own kind of immortality. When one makes a perfect painting that speaks across the generations, or leaves a lasting mark on philosophical discourse, he is doing so in answer to human existence. These are achievements within life, but sometimes one’s life itself, with its gestures large and small, its expressions of love, its useful consequences, is a noble achievement.

“If we do crave that kind of achievement, as I believe we should, then we could treat it as a kind of immortality,” Dworkin concludes. “We face death believing we have made something good in response to the greatest challenge a mortal faces. That may not be good enough for you: it may not soften even a bit the fear we face. But it is the only kind of immortality we can imagine; at least the only kind we have any business wanting. That is a religious conviction if anything is. It is available to you whichever of the two camps of religion, godly or godless, you choose to join.”

CAPTURING SOLDIERS: How photography influenced the Civil War (and vice versa)

BY ADAM PARKER

In the 1850s, as the new medium of photography found its footing in the commercial marketplace, the way people perceived their world and one another changed dramatically.

And when P.G.T. Beauregard’s forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, signaling the start of America’s most devastating war, photographers were ready to capitalize on the occasion.

To be sure, their work served to document the Civil War, but that was hardly its only — or main — purpose. The impact these images had on perceptions of the war and the behavior of soldiers and civilians alike was enormous.

A remarkable new exhibition, “Photography and the American Civil War,” which arrives at the Gibbes Museum September 27, seeks to explore “the role of the camera at a watershed moment in American culture.”

Organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show has garnered extensive attention and praise during its residency in New York City. It will occupy both second-floor exhibit galleries at the Gibbes until January 5, then head to the New Orleans Museum of Art for its last viewing.

“I’m very excited for it to be seen in another environment, one that has its own wonderful, complex history,” Rosenheim said in a telephone interview. “I think these pictures will come to life in Charleston.”

It will provide a rare opportunity to consider how art influenced the war, and how the war influenced art.

The human condition

Rosenheim conceived of the show more than 10 years ago, and spent the last five years intensely preparing it, he said.

“I worked years on this thing,” he said. “At end you make an exhibition, and the pictures take on new meaning when they are on the wall and associated with each other.” They demonstrate the photographic memory and cultural memory are inextricably intertwined.

“Photography and the American Civil War” consists of many objects — framed photos, large-format books, jewelry and mementos and other portable items that contained a tintype image. In this sense, Rosenheim said, the show has real weight.

It also establishes a common language with which the war could be understood, despite political and geographic differences, he said. The pictures include battlefield and field hospital scenes, landscapes and numerous portraits.

“What you see in the faces of these kids, very young, what you see in the faces of these soldiers, whether they’re from Virginia or Maine, is the belief that if they sit for their portrait they will survive the war.”

The pictures are visually simple, without much variation of pose or perspective, Rosenheim said.

“What’s not simple about them is how effectively they communicate. They’re not heroic, they’re anti-heroic.” And they offer “unvarnished insight into the human condition.”

That condition included all the profound courage, all the terror, all the ambivalence and devastating sorrow that accompanies unspeakable violence.

“Soldiers north and south were fighting for something they believed in,” Rosenheim said. “When they sat for their portrait they believed in it, too.” They believed that they were being immortalized. They believed in the supernatural force of art, the way it connects people and keeps them connected without regard for epoch. “We are so much more jaded today.”

The use of photography

Two years ago, Gibbes director Angela Mack received a call from her colleague Carrie Barrett, associate director of collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum. The two women had worked together before, lending objects back and forth and generating research on Southern American art.

Barrett and Rosenheim were looking for a partner in the South to host the Civil War exhibition, and the Gibbes was an obvious choice.

Mack emphasized the thrust of the presentation: “(Rosenheim) didn’t want it to be a historic show about the Civil War,” she said. “It’s a photography show. It shines a light on the medium and how it affected the war ... and public perception of a crisis.”

Gibbes Curator of Exhibitions Pam Wall noted that these are not the sort of war photographs we have become accustomed to. There are no action shots because the equipment was cumbersome and the exposure process long.

“So (photographers) came after a battle but before the bodies were moved,” she said.

It is possible that some scenes were deliberately staged or otherwise manipulated for effect. Photojournalistic ethics had not yet been developed.

“Photographers were taking advantage of the situation,” Mack said.

Many of the numerous photographers working at the time set up portable studios in order to capitalize on the war, offering to produce portraits of soldiers soon to become embroiled in the violence, Wall said. Getting these men to pay for a portrait often was not difficult: You better do this,” they were told, in case you don’t come home. At least your family will have something to remember you by.

And some photographers were hired to create partisan images designed to make the war look better or worse, depending on who the commissioner was, Wall said.

For example, George Barnard followed Sherman’s March to the Sea and created a large album of images he called “Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign, produced with the general’s support. He began in Nashville and documented the destruction in Atlanta, Savannah, Columbia and Charleston.

“They saw value in preserving their accomplishments,” Mack said. “It is clear that these guys understood the significance of the event. They understood that we were fighting for what we were going to become. So there was a lot of documentation.”

Rosenheim said the camera was often used as a tool for political activism or strategic planning, not only as a documentary device.

The 1863 photograph of a Louisiana slave whose back was covered with the scars of multiple whippings was produced for the explicit purpose of lending weight to the abolitionist movement up north, he said.

“Hundreds of thousands of portraits of survived,” Rosenheim said. “We believe something like a million pictures were made in those four years,” taken by 2,000 identified photographers. “That’s a lot. It touched everybody.”

A war like no other

“This is the first of America’s wars that’s visually publicized,” said Bernard Powers, a history professor at the College of Charleston. “This is very important because it added immediacy to conflict that Americans had never experienced before. (The images) gave us a better sense of the horrors of the conflict and the thorough-going destructiveness. And this raised the stakes, I think. It says to some, ‘We’ve got to commit ourselves’ — political leaders, soldiers — ‘to this conflict because we are so invested. Look at what we have lost. We’ve got to see it through.’”

At the same time, these startling images fueled the peace movement in the north, Powers said. Some northern Democrats who sympathized with the South, the Copperheads, argued that the carnage was insupportable.

And after the issuance of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, others reacted to the images by asking whether fighting a war to free black people was worth it, Powers added. Why not negotiate a settlement?

“From the vantage point of the individual soldier, this war was really like no other because of the volume of death, the massiveness of death, and in some cases the completeness of death. The instruments of war were more powerful and accurate. So soldiers who are killed, are completely obliterated” or buried in mass graves, or left to rot in the blood-stained fields. “There was nothing left to really mourn, except the photographs.”

The inhumanity of the carnage was underscored by photography, Powers said.

“Those who’ve studied this have told us about soldiers, who had their wits about them in the final moment, found in death clutching the photograph. The photograph takes the place of what would have been a more normal mourning situation and deathbed situation.”

Too often, death came in extraordinary ways and made extraordinary claims on the living. The grieving process was elongated, the emotional scars larger, the sense of dislocation profound.

“That can help us understand where we are today, in 2013, when we think of the homage that’s continued to be paid to the Confederacy,” Powers said. “We cannot disengage ourselves today, in 2013, from the way that death occurred during that four-year period.”

And the effect of the war, brought home through photographic images, had a lasting effect on the living. In Charleston after the war, all the women who could afford it would dress in mourning apparel, recognizing one another in the streets.

“This creates a new sorority of sorts, a sorority of sorrow that no one would have wanted to be a member of,” Powers said.

Nothing like it would happen again for a hundred years. In the 1960s as the Vietnam War began to rage with its unique fury, photography once again would insert itself into the making of history, he said.

The images seen on television every night “brought a certain kind of immediacy to the conflict that we hadn’t seen before.” And that immediacy — those images of cataclysmic violence — changed public opinion.

Holding on

Photography already was becoming an important new visual medium, but its speedy and significant entrance into mainstream American culture happened thanks to the war, Rosenheim said.

“It really needed a great subject.”

The war made the camera a cornerstone of private and institutional life, and itinerant photographers took full advantage of this change.

“It’s surprising to me was how thorough the camera integrated itself into the lives of many in the north and south, not just officers but also enlisted men, often having pictures made for the first time,” Rosenheim said. “What that meant to them must have been unbelievable.”

The photographs were worn on lapels, placed in broaches, carried in pockets, arranged in albums. In this way their subjects gained a certain immortality.

“If they survived that first battle, they sat for another picture,” Rosenheim said.

And memory itself — the manner in which people thought about the war — was at least partly influenced by this large photographic body of work.

Technological advancement made it all possible. The collodion “wet plate” process, which required portable darkrooms, gave way to the extensive use of dry plates, typically glass (ambrotype) or a sheet of metal (tintype) on which a dry light-sensitive emulsion was applied.

These new plates could be pre-coated and processed quickly, and tintypes were much cheaper than anything that had come before them.

The way people collected these objects, thought about them and formed emotional attachments to them is fascinating, Rosenheim said.

“The currency of pictures was just different,” he said. “Pictures were made, consumed, used by soldiers, officers, abolitionists, family, to hold on to something they knew could be lost so easily, and often was.”

The exhibit not only provides an opportunity to contemplate history, the significance of the Civil War and the meaning of art, it also raises important questions about our current era, Rosenheim said.

“What is the role of the camera in society today? What do we ask of our photographers today? What do we ask ourselves as consumers of images today?” 
In the age of the JPEG and MPEG, of social media, file sharing and remote digital storage, answering these questions could shed some light on who we are and how we choose to live.