Re-imaging and modern memory of the Great War
Peter Neill
University of Ulster, Belfast
ps.neill@ulster.ac.uk
Photographic critic and historian Susan Sontag stated an in article in The New
Yorker:
The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they
remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs
eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering (Sontag, 2002)
Even in our digital age the verity of the photograph as an accurate documentation of
an event is rarely questioned. The war photographer, in the commonplace
interpretation, is someone who attempts to objectively register reality with a camera
rather than interpret it as a traditional war artist might have done.
But, can an apparently objective recording of a subject actually raise more questions
than it answers?
This paper sets out to question how a photographic record can actually lead us to
question authenticity, history, reality and memory. It examines how a contemporary
photographer might respond to conflict, particularly if that conflict is already in the
past and questions whether photographic work made after the event can have
relevance to, or even an influence on how war is remembered.
What can contemporary photography add to our understanding of any past event,
particularly one so grave and emotionally charged as war?
Within a modern context there are a number of artists who have responded to and
questioned the memory and understanding of war through contemporary
photographic practice.
In a series called ‘Fatescapes’, Pavel Smejkal questions the idea the iconic images
by which we recognize particular conflicts and he makes photographs which
challenge the spectator’s understanding and perception.
FIGURE 1
(This image is from Robert Capa’s Fallen Soldier, Spain 1936)
The photographs do not have a visual ‘subject’, they are basically empty of anything
except ‘background’ – they have ‘field’ but no ‘image’. He has taken well-known
photographs of conflict and removed, using digital correction software, the subject
from the original image.
FIGURE 2
(This image is from Eddie Adams Saigon Execution, Vietnam 1968)
It is only when the ‘subject’ disappears that one can realize that the assumed
understanding of an event is often based on a globally replicated photographic image.
Smejkal poses the question of not just what one remembers, but also how one
remembers. Digital information now infiltrates modern culture and society at every
level of understanding and research. Smejkal’s post-modern exploitation uses the
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technology to question the technology; images are manipulated and changed using
the same toolkit that makes them available.
Smejkal tests the viewers’ understanding and received memory of the events of
conflict. The work questions how we understand wars – wars which have occurred
outside either our geographical or historical experience. One realizes from Smejkal’s
work that much of our knowledge and memory comes from the now iconic images of
that time.
FIGURE 3
(This image is from Nick UT Napalm Bomb Attack, Vietnam 1972)
In contrast to Smejkal’s work, in a project called ‘Surfaces’, Liza Nguyen uses a
comingling of the verbal and the visual to address issues that are crucial to our
interpretation of the photographic image. Nguyen was born in Paris as her father left
Vietnam during the time of the conflict with America to live in France. She had never
experienced the war in her father’s country. Her response has been to try to
understand an inherited memory. How could an artist grieve a history and a country
they personally hadn’t experienced? This question becomes our question. She
explores representation, memory and aesthetics and questions how to visually
represent the past and how memory is built in the present.
FIGURE 4
Nguyen travelled to Vietnam and collected small samples of earth from different parts
of the country; these were then photographed against a stark white background. The
work also provides a platform to make a statement at several levels, including
political and humanitarian, showing land affected by war and contemporary military
technology and its aftermath. However the treatment of the subject also questions
how war can be imaged. The piles of soil are inherently uninteresting and
meaningless until the titles My Lai, Hue and Da Nang give them a context. The work
has a simplicity by its use of the plain view, gentle lighting, flat background and
repetitive imagery. The image themselves are almost anonymous until a simple clue
transforms them for the audience; the realization is sudden and powerful.
Magnum Agency member Donovan Wylie has examined the use of photographic
imagery in recent and current conflict. A native of Ireland, he has visually examined
the country’s violent history through a series of publications and exhibitions.
In 2007, as part of continuing work in response to the Northern Ireland troubles, he
published ‘British Watchtowers’. He made a series of ‘portraits’ of heavily protected
observation posts around the border areas of South Armagh.
FIGURE 5
The photographs were all made from the heightened vantage point of a helicopter
providing a perspective that visually interrogates the siting of the watchtower
structures in the green hills of Northern Ireland. It provides the viewer with an
opportunity to question the use of the existing landscape to gain an advantage over
the ‘observed’ population.
FIGURE 6
Wylie has delivered a cold, deceptively neutral set of images, which appear to be a
very simple photographic record of a defence and intelligence gathering method
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developed to exploit geography and terrain. Wylie doesn’t try to give a political
viewpoint, but instead has adroitly presented a ‘slice of time’, which for those who
lived through it is also, a ‘slice of their lives’.
When the watchtowers were later being dismantled on completion of the Irish peace
process, Wylie discovered that much of the equipment and technology was to be
relocated in Afghanistan. As a result, in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum,
he travelled to Kandahar Province to complete a new series of images called
‘Outposts’ in 2010.
FIGURE 7
Afghanistan has a long history of conflict from the Afghan-Anglo wars of the 19th
Century through to the invasion by the Soviet Union in 1979. It is a landscape in
which, for centuries, the high vantage point has been utilized to achieve tactical
superiority. From its ancient hill forts, to lookout posts built by the Russians, to the
electronic surveillance of today.
Wylie chooses to photograph a politically charged landscape but produces images
that question the genre of documentary war photography. He makes images which
appear ancient and timeless, almost “sublime”, in the traditional landscape sense.
FIGURE 8
Gerry Badger writes in the afterword of the publication:
‘Outposts’ is a striking paean to both a landscape and a vernacular
architecture. In its exploration of the architecture of conflict, it adopts a
scrupulously neutral position, or so we assume. (Wylie) does make us think,
in different ways – about history, about geopolitics, about the joys and
problems of visual representation – some of which may be uncomfortable,
and quite unexpected. (Badger 2011, Afterword in Wylie, ‘Outposts’, p.67)
Wylie’s photographs create a quiet, but powerful, visual tension reflecting the
impasse of the observer and the observed.
Aymeric Fouquez is a photographer who has examined an earlier war. Having grown
up in Northern France, he has made images in response to the cemeteries of World
War One which are so numerous in that area.
FIGURE 9
Fouquez photographically studies the military cemeteries in the context of the
landscape and the surrounding environment. Because of his local knowledge and
familiarity with the subject he can make images that go far beyond the usual,
expected and often repeated pictures by visiting photographers and ‘war tourists’,
where the rows of headstones are recorded with an aspiration towards an aesthetic
composition and act as documentation of a personal pilgrimage.
FIGURE 10
In his book ‘Nord’ (2010) the photographs are carefully composed to show a former
war zone that has not forgotten its past and is living with that memory which is
changing with time. Within each of these pictures, which could be considered as
modern rural landscapes with reference to farmhouses, allotments, roads and even
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sports facilities, there is a quiet allusion to the war that was to end all wars. There is
a feeling of the familiar and the ordinary in his photographs. He has recognized that
the local population accepts the traumatic past as a normal part of the environment.
He has made work that has avoided sensationalism, yet does not belittle the sacrifice
of 100 years ago.
As a visual artist I also wanted to investigate how artistic intervention can re-interpret
established historical parameters and viewpoints. My aim was to create a personal
artistic response to an existing historical record of one individual’s involvement in
WW1, and in using photographic practice to question how perception, memory and
imagination interact with a received narrative history.
Initial research into documentation relating to World War One led to an investigation
of the papers of the Perceval-Maxwell family from Co. Down in Ireland and in
particular the letters, photographs and relevant documents relating to Robert David
Perceval-Maxwell.
Maxwell was born in 1870 and was part of an old landowning family, he inherited the
estate in 1902. The running of the house and its surrounding land required a great
deal of hired labour, both domestic servants and farm workers. In the Great War he
became second in command of the 13th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, part of the 36th
Ulster Division. He left the army in 1919 as a Colonel and is still referred to as
‘Colonel Bob’, within the family.
Although outside the scope of this paper, much research and literature (Dooley,
Robinson, Bowen, et al) has examined the experiences of the officer ‘class’ in World
War One, and the situation of the landowning families with their long pedigree of
traditions and attitudes. Other researchers (Jeffery, Fitzpatrick, et al) have also dealt
with the politics of Ireland during the Great War and have examined such conflicts as,
Irish/English, Nationalist/Unionist, Tenant/Landowner, and the Dublin rising of 1916.
Contained in the Maxwell archives are many letters from Bob to his wife, his sons
and his mother. There is also an album of photographs recording his experiences in
France in the Great War. The album contains some trench photographs and many in
Martinsart Wood where the Royal Irish Rifles were camped before the Battle of the
Somme in 1916.
FIGURE 11
His photographic work seems to be concerned not with the human tragedy and
pathos of conflict, but with the upheaval and disruption of former agricultural land and
forests in Northern France. A landscape, which had been metamorphosed into a
surreal world of badly camouflaged huts, communication trenches, parapets and fire
steps.
FIGURE 12
The images are what might be expected from a well-educated officer with limited
technical knowledge attempting to record his experience. They appear to be a selfcensored personal memoir of his time in military service, although this may have
been the norm in an era when a stiff upper lip was expected and one’s family had to
be protected from the horrors of trench warfare.
FIGURE 13
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However one can begin to perceive parallels between life as an officer in the British
army and life as a landowner and estate manager. War could be seen to be
ultimately about control. Control of territory, control of movement, control of people,
in the same way as an agricultural estate might be managed.
Colonel Bob was a very prolific letter writer when on active service. His letters from
the trenches refer, not primarily to the conflict, but to the administration and daily
practical tasks concerning the farm estate in County Down, even though they are
obviously written under the most harrowing and traumatic conditions of the British
Expeditionary Force in France’s Western Front. The letters are filled with his
instructions relating to the management of his estate in Ireland and illustrate how he
is affected by the duality of his situation. Both letters and photographs give an insight
into the educated mind-set of an officer in this situation, with his long experience of
commanding staff and of land management, whether for agriculture and animal
husbandry, or for defence.
The Perceval-Maxwell estate papers also include two volumes of the Farm
Manager’s daily journal, which records the work that was carried out each day, who
was hired, who was ill and what animals were sold. The gentle, matter of fact,
description indicates a pace of life in natural response to the landscape and the
seasons, which must have been in total contrast to a serving soldier’s day-to-day
experience on the Western Front. Each entry has a quiet mention of the weather.
The relationship between war and photography is interesting not only in how the
reality of war might be revealed but in the way that the war is forever reinvented. The
First World War is immense in scope but that should not obscure the fact that
perhaps the only humane perspective of any war is individual and personal. The
photographic images in this research have been made as an inquiry into Maxwell’s
geographical and mental displacement. For this reason I chose to study and respond
to the parallel lives revealed in the letters.
In my work I chose not to show the obvious relics and artifacts of the conflict but
wanted to make photographs which echoed the simplicity and almost lyrical quality of
the narratives revealed in the letters. The earliest work was made in the Finnebrogue
estate in Ireland over a period of almost one year. I wanted to create images which
were devoid of any indicators of a particular time period, but the intention was that
the subjects and scenes would be those with which Colonel Bob would have been
familiar.
From a technical point of view, I wanted to produce something of the visual feeling of
Perceval-Maxwell’s own photographs and images of the time with a straightforward
and apparently objective approach to his subjects. All of my pictures were made at
normal elevation and used long exposures in keeping with the historic visual
aesthetic.
In early 2012, I made photographs in Northern France, the aesthetic and scale being
informed by the previous work in Ireland. As the land has healed and obscured the
scars of conflict, Thiepval Wood has now grown to become very similar to the forests
of the Finnebrogue estate and the rolling landscape is not unlike parts of Co. Down.
The visual clues in the photographs are intentionally ambiguous.
Memories and observations become living experiences and history and fiction
supplement them. What finally becomes recognised in the image can be something
'outside' of the image, something out of sight, imperceptible. In this visual
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involvement something is revealed which is not ‘historical’ but rather something that
exists and is present here and now.
Roland Barthes claimed in Camera Lucida that,
Ultimately photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels or even
stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. (Barthes 1982, p.62)
This attempt to go beyond the surface of the image is to find things that have
connections to other meanings than those which they are directly representing.
A photographic image has an inherent weakness, in that it is fixed. It may be good at
‘showing’, but not necessarily good at ‘telling’. A politicised landscape or image can
be misread when the context indicators are removed, a story unfolds and never ends.
I wanted my photographs to occupy a space, between documentation and narrative,
and between overt expression and that which is left unsaid.
The photographs in this work were made in the Somme and Thiepval areas of
France and on the Finnebrogue Estate and the surrounding location in Ireland. The
texts below are from Perceval-Maxwell’s letters, the Finnebrogue Estate Manager’s
journal, War Diaries of 13th RIR and Falls’ ‘History of the 36th Ulster Division’.
FIGURE 14
My darling
Just a line to keep you informed. Well everything is very quiet and no news worth or
possible to mention. I hope you are getting on well with the farm and garden. So glad
to hear the trees are planted and that the greenhouses are coming on.
Letter to Edith from R.D. Perceval-Maxwell
FIGURE 15
Saturday July 1st July 1916 – Thiepval Wood
The men had hot tea for breakfast and a rum ration before they got out to the attack
at about 6.30 am. They paraded and filed up to the three gaps in our parapet.
Colonel Savage Commander - 13th Royal Irish Rifles
FIGURE 16
Saturday July 1st July 1916 - Finnebrogue Estate
Very Wet Day
Carting manure from Stock Yard to Fort Hill – Turned out so very wet – Had to stop.
All hands went to other jobs of work in the Farm Yard
1 Fagot man, 1 man in Dairy Byer.
1 sheep 48lbs – less Head. 13lbs mutton
FIGURE 17
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Saturday July 1st July 1916 – Thiepval Wood
“I stood on the parapet between the two centre exits to wish them luck. They got
going without delay; no fuss, no shouting, no running, everything solid and thorough
– just like the men themselves, Here and there a boy wave his hand to me as I
shouted good luck to them. And all had a cheery face.”
General Ricardo Commander - 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
FIGURE 18
You are quite right to send away the bullock he should be pretty fat now and fetch a
fair price. I am glad you got two nice calves but I suspect you had to pay for them. I
am glad that the hens are doing their duty at last and that you are selling plenty of
butter.
Letter to Edith from R.D. Perceval-Maxwell
FIGURE 19
Saturday July 1st July 1916 – Thiepval Wood
The night was quiet except fairly heavy shelling. Men kept coming in, wounded men
and others so tired, that they lay down, just where they were.
Colonel Savage Commander 13th Royal Irish Rifles
FIGURE 20
My Darling
I got two lovely letters from you yesterday - all your letters are delightful and I love
you consulting me about things you must not think that it bothers me a bit it only
makes me feel that we are nearer together and writing every day just as one talks
makes things much nicer.
Letter to Edith from R.D. Perceval-Maxwell
FIGURE 21
Saturday July 1st July 1916 – Schwaben Redoubt
He put his head up once too often, you see, they were shooting over his head a sort
of decoy but he put his head up once too often and he just got a bullet right there.
Dead as a door nail.
Rifleman William McIlroy - ‘C’ Company, 13th Royal Irish Rifles
FIGURE 22
Saturday July 29th July 1916 – Finnebrogue Estate
Fine Day
1 man mowing – All hands at Hay on Bean Hill and the Bog.
1 Fagot man, 1 man in Dairy Byer
No sheep killed this week
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REFERENCES:
BARTHES, R. (1982) Camera Lucida, London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.
BOWEN, E. (1990) The Last September. New ed. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
DOOLEY, T. A. M. (2001) The decline of the 'big house' in Ireland: a study of Irish
landed families. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
FALLS, C. (1922) The history of the 36th Ulster Division. Belfast: The Linenhall Press.
FITZPATRICK, D. (1998) Politics and Irish Life 1913-21: Provincial Experiences of
War and Revolution. New edition. Ireland: Cork University Press
FOUQUEZ, A. (2010) Nord. Baden, Switzerland: Kodoji Press.
JEFFERY, K. (2000) Ireland and the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
ROBINSON, L. (1928) The Big House: Four Scenes in Its Life. London: MacMillan.
SONTAG, S. (2002) A Critic at Large, Looking at war, Photography’s view of
devastation and death, (Dec 9), New York: The New Yorker.
WYLIE, D. (2007) British Watchtowers, Germany: Steidl
WYLIE, D. (2011) Outposts, Germany: Steidl.
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