Ghosts in the landscape

by Craig Barber

"After serving in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, photographer Craig Barber returns twenty-eight years later to a country that he first saw through the eyes of combat. Haunted by the deaths he witnessed, Barber carries his memories of being eighteen with a taunting bull's-eye painted on his helmet, the smell of smoldering bombs, and the cries of the dying back to Vietnam in order to put his ghosts to rest. In the Vietnamese countryside, he captures the healing landscapes with bomb craters turned into fish-rearing ponds and watering reservoirs, metal sections from former airstrip runways transformed into window grates, and shell casings functioning as fence posts. An essay by Alison Devine Nordstrom, Curator of Photographs at the George Eastman House, Rochester, offers insight into photography's role in unlayering the past."--BOOK JACKET.