The Boy Soldiers series depicts American children at play. Specifically, the photographs show the young participants of organized battle reenactments. They clutch their weapons, they fall down dead, they confront the camera with bravery. I am interested in how patriotism gets passed down through generations in the United States. To what extent and through what mechanisms are our natural impulses to tell stories and perform war games developed and/or hijacked while we are still young? Is a re-enactor child equipped with a cultivated historical consciousness or an inoculation against the sights and sounds of battle to the point of being desensitized to the gravities of war?
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