But also looked at the history of WWI and its battles - until we understand how can it be "Lest we forget".
I don't want to glorify war but want to acknowledge, respect that sacrifice under absolute extreme conditions
For the past six years I have organised a Remembrance Service for the older folk in the community in which I volunteer. Many of them saw active service in WWII, others lost brothers & other male relatives. For the VE Day +60 celebrations, I interviewed six of the older folk and inserted their stories into a timeline of WWII powerpoint presentation, placing them at significant periods of the war. I think I gained the most from doing this!
A few years ago I wrote a piece for Remembrance called "How can I remember them?" which asks the questions how does my generation who have not experienced war take up the baton of remembrance to teach to our children who are even further removed from it all. They have not sat with Grandad and heard some of his tales. The recent and on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan send mixed messages around the rightness of these wars and the constant flow of hearses through Wotton Bassett.
Remembrance & memory are very intertwined. Remembrance has its own day in history. War memorials in town centre and church yards stand silent for much of the year. They are just part of the street furniture. I read somewhere there were more than 125,000 war memorials (the UKNational Inventory of War Memorials have recorded information of around 60,000)
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| Bayeaux War Graves, Normandy |
In 2008 we holidayed in Normandy. Visiting the war cemetery at Bayeux was awesome, impressive, shocking, sobering, sad
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| screenshot: selection of war memorials shot in landscape & wide-angle |
Today travelling through small towns and villages, seemingly untouched and living in an era of their own, I often get a fleeting glimpse of the war memorial that tells a different tale. Villages so small that the barely register have lost so many. Many times I have wanted to stop but the journey is to elsewhere. This summer I started visiting villages (in Cambs) just to look/photograph their war memorials.
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| Screenshot: war memorials typology |
I have decided to try and cover as much of Sussex as possible, to create a collection of images that explore memory & remembrance, and the prevailing attitudes towards them. To look at memorials inside and outside of the weeks around remembrance to see the differences. There are also significant differences in towns and villages, and in street or churchyard sitings
As an off-shoot to this I am creating a typology of war memorials - head on shot of front of memorial, portrait mode & cropped quite close.
NB lots of celtic crosses in churchyards
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| Eyam, Derbyshire |
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| Washington, Sussex |
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| Thakeham, Sussex |
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| Picardy and Bapaume Avenue, Northern Ireland by Chris Harriso |
Images (below) from Source Magazine Issue 21. I remember reading this at college - probably a couple of years ago. Finding it again now, I am really surprised at how similar my images are to these - it must've made more of an impact than I realised!
Begs the question - where do I take my work from here?
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| Sheerness, Kent by Chris Harrison |
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