One of my major goals for this year is to finish planning and start my Civil War Infrared photography project in anticipation of the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War next year. In a nutshell my project is to photograph the Civil War battlefields using an Infrared converted digital camera. You can view some of the images in this Flickr set.

I have always found the study of the past and history an interesting subject. I continue to research and learn about the history of the world in my spare time and listen to several history based podcasts on my daily commute to work. I'm not sure if I'm just wired that way or maybe it was an influential history teacher in my past that generated my interest in History. You can't chalk it up to older age since I have always been interested in the subject (especially Military history.) 

Many people could care less about history and have no idea why I would want to waste my time on such a project. I recently saw the following article in my feed reader and it gave me a pause to think about how people think and view history.

Proof that History puts people to sleep
Gary Crabbe Enlightened Images

"However, with my current book project, the minute I tell people (or they sense) that it's a history book, they fall asleep. They turn off. They tune out. They switch off their radar. It's like you suddenly become a non-important entity. In all of my career, I've never experienced anything like this. But it's happened so often, among so many people at so many levels, that I'm now 1000% convinced that it's purely related to the history aspect." [ read more ]

So with this in mind I'm opening up the following questions to my readers.

Do you tune out history?

Do you have interest in history based photographic projects as an art viewer or maybe an art buyer?

Please leave a comment below.

I ask this question more out of curiosity rather than determining the future of this project. As a creative person and image maker I'm still going to proceed as planned no matter what the response. I'm just curious if history based projects are doomed to failure from the start.