Civil War Reenactors at Fort Point
Here’s the thing about these dudes buttoning themselves into wool and brass at Fort Point: they’re chasing something that never existed in the first place. The contact sheet doesn’t lie the way memory does; every frame captures another angle of the same desperate authenticity, the same hunger to touch something real by performing something fundamentally fake. These cats are out here on the rocks beneath the Golden Gate sweating through their period correct undergarments, loading black powder into reproduction rifles, and for what? To get closer to a war that was never about honor or states’ rights or any of that Lost Cause mythology horseshit, but about whether you could own another human being, full stop.
The contact sheet, that grid of sequential moments, those multiple takes on the same staged reality, becomes this perfect metaphor for reenactment itself: you shoot it again and again, trying to capture the feeling, the truth, but each frame just confirms you’re repeating a lie in different lighting. It’s pageantry as painkiller, spectacle as amnesia, and these guys are mainlining it every weekend, playing soldier in the shadow of a bridge that represents actual American ambition and engineering genius, not the dream of plantation aristocracy. The camera sees everything: the anachronistic watch tan, the historically inaccurate posture, the way contemporary softness shows through no matter how period the costume. Pure American fakery, rendered in 12 honest medium format exposures.