Reenacting Wars That No Camera Ever Saw

No photograph exists of the battles fought before the camera was invented. Ana Paganini's "200 Summers Later" does not try to fill that gap; it documents the communities who reenact those battles today, including the 210th anniversary staging of Waterloo. Her tools matter: a vintage Hasselblad and 120mm film flatten the distance between a costumed weekend and the century it borrows from.

That ambiguity is the point. A digital frame would date the scene instantly; medium format film leaves the viewer unsure which decade they are looking at. What the series also records is selection. The conflicts chosen for reenactment tend to be founding moments of national narrative, staged from the winning side, with civilian loss largely absent from the field. Paganini does not correct that bias. She photographs it, which is a more useful thing to do.