Roger Fenton is the first known photographer to capture battlefield scenes. He made wetplate collodion photographs during the Crimean War in 1855. But it was Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s 1863 photograph of the Union dead on the field at Gettysburg, “A Harvest of Death,” that inspired Karl Burke’s project, “The Harvest of Death” (created between December 2011 and January 2012) which puts a contemporary spin on these historic war photographs. Burke played video war games, eventually taking screen grabs and then re-photographing them with 19th century lenses and techniques. “I realized I could use the wetplate collodion technique combined with computer-generated first-person perspective war-type imagery to simultaneously talk about the history of war photography and the present and future of our use of remote imagery/images of virtual realities for both entertainment and warfare purposes.”

Burke, along with 500 artists from all over the world will compete for the Grand Prix during the 2013 FotoFestiwal in Łódź, Poland, June 6-16.