Thursday, October 8, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Way behind...
I am way behind, not only on the postings for this blog, but also the work for the journal...
But June, which turned into a book all by itself, is finished.
In June this year we were in Normandy for the 65th anniversary of D-Day. While visiting the "recently" dug-out bunkers at Grandcamp Maisy, I was struck by the opposites of that day and the same day in 1944.
2009: beautiful weather, very quiet, wild flowers everywhere. 1944: the weather wasn't so good, it must've been deafening with all the shooting and bombing going on, and certainly the wild flowers would've been trampled by soldiers' boots. And if not, would the soldiers have noticed them?
I had similar thoughts when visiting an allied cemetary a couple of days later. Really quiet, flowers everywhere, immaculately groomed graves and head stones. You could think the soldiers finally had their peace and quiet, but at the same time it seemed so unreal and contradictory.
Hence "A Soldier of the Second World War". Photographs of the head stones are from the allied cemetary in ???, flowers picked at Grandcamp Maisy, V-mail acquired from Ebay, negatives of soldiers' pictures are original glass Kodak negatives from 1942-44 and actual accounts from soldiers are from the PBS website .
To show what the pictures would've looked like, I have reversed one of the negatives:
But June, which turned into a book all by itself, is finished.
In June this year we were in Normandy for the 65th anniversary of D-Day. While visiting the "recently" dug-out bunkers at Grandcamp Maisy, I was struck by the opposites of that day and the same day in 1944.
2009: beautiful weather, very quiet, wild flowers everywhere. 1944: the weather wasn't so good, it must've been deafening with all the shooting and bombing going on, and certainly the wild flowers would've been trampled by soldiers' boots. And if not, would the soldiers have noticed them?
I had similar thoughts when visiting an allied cemetary a couple of days later. Really quiet, flowers everywhere, immaculately groomed graves and head stones. You could think the soldiers finally had their peace and quiet, but at the same time it seemed so unreal and contradictory.
Hence "A Soldier of the Second World War". Photographs of the head stones are from the allied cemetary in ???, flowers picked at Grandcamp Maisy, V-mail acquired from Ebay, negatives of soldiers' pictures are original glass Kodak negatives from 1942-44 and actual accounts from soldiers are from the PBS website .
To show what the pictures would've looked like, I have reversed one of the negatives:
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