Fee's interfusion of old and new was what really made the experience. .
I was of course first attracted to the exhibit by the large color photos of rusty machine gun turrets and blown up Japanese Zeros in the jungle backdrop. But as I started going through the exhibit and looking at the smaller, less obvious, old black and white photos, I really began to understand what Fee was doing. There were pictures of tanks on the battled field, war buddies smiling and posing, sick bays and dead soldiers, cannons being fired and exploding airplanes. The old pictures portrayed a small portion of the intensity, danger and emotion that was present, and is present during war. The pictures gave the viewer a real sense of what was happening and what the immediate effects of it all were. Then Fee, masterfully, contrasted the old black and whites with intricate color photos of the same island in the present. A downed airplane sat half in the clear ocean water and half sticking into the air like a rusty shark fin. Destroyed and abandoned tanks, corroded machine guns and desolated command post filled the gaps between the authentic black and whites. The message Fee was pushing was the indefinable and unexplainable act of war. Here he had pictures of all the fighting, destruction and dying with pictures of motionless and surreal jungle overgrowing the war memorabilia. What and why, were the questions or statements that the exhibit seemed to be asking. What had the fighting and dying achieved, years later? An island that was once fought fiercely over now lay lifeless and uninhabited.
The hardest part was not to find a picture to write about, but to narrow it down to just one. I finally decided on a large color photo titled "Valentino's Tank, 2000-2001." The pictures was 2"x 2" in size and took up its own wall. In the picture, an old American WWII tank was portrayed rolled on its side and blown apart. The tank was rusted and corroded, it had taken a dark gray and brown color from being weathered from years gone by, it looked ancient.