Photo by Marsha Polier Grossman

By juxtaposing past and present, pinhole photographer Willie Anne Wright '45 gives glimpses of life using her camera that may startle the viewer into asking -- why is General Custer standing next to a Dodge truck?

In a recent exhibition, Civil War Redux: Pinhole Photographs by Willie Anne Wright, scheduled to close on Oct. 29 at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., she follows Civil War re-enactors and captures them in a way that eerily resembles Matthew Brady's original photography of that era.

"Willie Anne was one of the first, and continues to be one of the most important, artists working with the pinhole photographic process. Her Civil War Redux images beautifully utilize the ethereal quality of the pinhole image, appearing to open a passageway to the cataclysm of the Civil War," says Brooks Johnson, curator of photography, Chrysler Museum of Art. "It takes only a bit of imagination to see that with this timeless process, she appears to summon the ghosts of the past."

Another venue, the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va., will feature Wright's pinhole photography in The Monitor Revisited: Pinhole Photographs and Photomontages, opening Nov. 4, 2006 and running into spring 2007. This special exhibition will be made up of images Wright has taken of Civil War re-enactors and the full-scale replica of the USS Monitor.

"Preparing photomontages provides me a chance to learn more of the history of naval engagements in the Civil War and the participants involved," says Wright. But she doesn't turn her back on modern technology to create her images. "I confess to using 21st-century technology to find relevant 19th- century images. The Internet, the scanner and a printer were my tools to create montages and to make negatives from them."

A photography class assignment in 1972 -- creating a pinhole camera -- turned into a lifetime career for Wright. Taking the class in order to learn how to photograph her paintings, she instead discovered an art form that was a true expression of herself. Prior to the class, Wright was a painter for eight years. She finds inspiration for her photographs from 19th-century photographers such as Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron.

"Events and personalities of long ago are still informing us," she says. "I agree with William Faulkner -- the past is not dead. It isn't even past."