| The first time I went to a reenactment pageant, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to see, but I had been told that people in a small town in Wyoming had been dressing up like settlers and Indians, and acting out a story from the pioneer era since the 1940s. I decided to go and photograph the ritual since I had long been interested in Western landscapes and the history of westward expansion. I became captivated by the way this reenactment referenced so many layers of history and raised so many questions about our present-day relationship to the past. After documenting my first reenactment, I went looking for more, and over the past nine years I’ve continued to photograph reenactments throughout the American West. | 
|
Place and Time: Reenactment Pageant Photographs will be on view from October 3 to November 30 at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Taylor Museum.
Edie Winograde
The first time I went to a reenactment pageant, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to see, but I had been told that people in a small town in Wyoming had been dressing up like settlers and Indians, and acting out a story from the pioneer era since the 1940s. I decided to go and photograph the ritual since I had long been interested in Western landscapes and the history of westward expansion. I became captivated by the way this reenactment referenced so many layers of history and raised so many questions about our present-day relationship to the past. After documenting my first reenactment, I went looking for more, and over the past nine years I’ve continued to photograph reenactments throughout the American West. I’m especially interested in reenactments that take place in their original location, where the local people’s connection to the place and its history form the impetus for the staging of the event.
It’s said that history is the collective memory of past experience. My interest in these reenactments—aside from the visual appeal of their extravagant theatrics—is to underscore their qualities of mimesis and déjà vu. The imagery is familiar to many viewers; we’ve seen these depictions of the West in paintings and movies and TV shows, and each successive American generation has reinvented and re-engaged this landscape and its stories. More so than any other region of the country, the West is a myth-laden realm. Most of the reenactments I’ve photographed were originally inspired by these stories: the journey of Lewis and Clark, the Gold Rush, Custer’s Last Stand, the Oregon Trail.
When these original events happened, photography had not or had barely been invented. A lot of times people look at my photographs and think that I have somehow staged these scenarios myself, in the directorial style that many current photographers employ. I respond by telling them that I’m only a spectator and that my images are intended to blur the boundaries between past and present, history and imagination.
