CRAIG BARBER
Craig Barber has photographed scenes from his travels in the United States and abroad, but a recent trip to Thailand and Vietnam had a much more profound significance than his earlier projects. In Vietnam, Barber spent most of his time traveling and photographing in the central region between Da Nang and Chu Lai, the same area in which he was stationed as a combat marine from April 1966 to December 1967. To Barber, traveling meant the back roads not outlined in the backpackers' guidebook. Many of the villages in which Barber stayed and photographed had not been regularly visited since the war.
Barber's travels brought him to areas virtually undeveloped and unchanged from the time he was a soldier. He developed a close bond with the people he saw and was often invited into their homes as a guest. Most of Barber's photographs show the unchanged landscape and villages. In one village, Barber met a woman who claimed to have remembered him from twenty-eight years earlier. In the image There is a Future, the halves of this diptych show a straw house which has been partially rebuilt in brick. This slow renovation continues as its owners have the time and resources to produce more bricks, one at a time. Barber's photographs show this gradual move from the Vietnam he knew before to the Vietnam he was rediscovering.
Barber's panoramic images evoke the look of the 19th century photographs of city scenes, giving the illusion of desertion due to the slow exposures of the camera which do not record the images of people in motion. Since his exposures could last several minutes, the people of the villages were seldom seen in Barber's photographs, although they were often present behind the camera with the photographer. In the image He Just Stood There, one young boy endured the length of Barber's exposure, and the film records his movements as a ghost-like presence in the frame. The sense of isolation in Barber's photographs echoes the quiet isolation felt by Barber and other soldiers. He writes of this in a journal entry: "The lack of discernible change is jarring at times. More than once, as I have wandered in the small hamlets searching for images, I have felt on patrol. The weight of my pack feeling all too familiar and the tripod feeling as a weapon. I am not in the midst of flashbacks, I am in complete control of my faculties, yet déjà vu runs deep within my veins while winding my way along narrow dirt paths and bamboo groves, scattered hooches and barking dogs, water buffalo and rice paddies, fishing villages and coconut trees; it would be impossible NOT to remember events."
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