The magazine of the photo-essay
Dec 2017 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by E F Kitchen
The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is a group devoted to re-creating the
arts and activities of the Middle Ages in the present. One of their activities is to
create large-scale mock wars, in which they wear period armor and engage in
physically rigorous combat. Not content to stage polite mock battles, they meet by
the thousands on vast fields, wearing full body armor and forcefully striking one
another with rattan swords.
From 2003 to 2005, I photographed and interviewed heavyweight fighters from the
SCA on location at the sites where they reenact various battle scenarios. I present
them to you here under their SCA names and personas.
To create the images, I used a large-format 8 x 10 camera and then made custom
platinum prints from the original negatives. I chose antique photographic
equipment and an archival printing method to achieve a look that would be
impossible to create using a modern, point-and-shoot camera: the antique lenses
have defects that make the images unique, and the platinum prints evoke a certain timelessness with their exceptional
detail and rich, expanded tonal scale. Like my subjects, many of whom make their battle armor by hand over hundreds of
hours, I am using an antiquated creative process as an alternative to the high-speed consumption and production of
the present. Both my photographic process and my subjects’ activities are anachronistic, all of us looking to the past for
something missing from the present.
Warriors are icons for an idealistic code of behavior that we can recall with affectionate myopia—their faults forgotten,
virtues exaggerated. Fascinated by their power, ethics, and formidable attire, these present-day suburban knights are
trying to emulate them; my work is to try to understand their quixotic tendencies and to capture some of that mystique.
PowerHouse Books published a book of my photographs, Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages in August 2010.
E. F. Kitchen
