Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a photographic odyssey through the lands of the First World War. For more than ten years the photographer travelled from the dust of the Namib deserts to the frozen heights of the Vosges to create a unique collection of images that document how time and nature have transformed these places of horror and killing into landscapes of great beauty and tranquillity...If anyone wants the reason for these photographs then they need look no further than the thoughts of a veteran leaving the shattered fields of the Somme who wrote: "No, they would not be lonely, I saw that bare country before me...the miles and miles of torn earth...the litter, the dead trees. But the country would come back to life, the grass would grow again, the wild flowers return. They would lie still and at peace below the singing larks, beside the serenely flowing rivers. They could not feel lonely, they would have one another. And...though we were going home and leaving them behind, we belonged to them, and they would be a part of us for ever." (P. J. Campbell).
Trade ReviewStrikingly, aerial images revealed the scars of trench lines and craters still clearly visible despite an overlay of bucolic verdancy. Nature, it seemed, had sought to soothe the physical wounds, but, like the landscape sculpted by the erstwhile fortifications, their memory could never be so easily erased. -- Alan Cowell New York Times, June 14 2016
Table of ContentsContents: Frontier battles; Flanders; Nord-Pas-de-Calais; Picardy; Oise-Aisne; Champagne-Ardenne; Lorraine; Alsace; The Masurian Lakes; Italy; Thessaloniki; Gallipoli; Africa; Beersheba.
