First shown at Médiathèque Le Teil in 2009, with the support of the Ardèche-Rhône Cultural Dept., south-central France, a selection of these photographic works are exhibited to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, alongside ephemera including British and German newspaper headlines of the day, barbed wire recovered from Gold Beach and a metal-faced watch belonging to a young British soldier who never returned from Normandy. Exhibition runs until June 22nd, open Mon-Wed 10 am-2 pm and Thurs-Sat 4 pm-11 pm.
Tommy Flowers’ codebreaking machines, Colossus I & II, were key in the Normandy campaign, speeding up to real-time, the deciphering of Lorenz, ‘Hitler’s Blackberry’, giving the Allies the locations and battle plans of the German military in Europe.
The photographers showing a small selection of their larger works in this exhibition are Peter Mackertich and Garry Hunter. Mackertich’s Blockhaus is a long-term project beginning in the early 1980s, to document the Atlantic Wall, using 5×4 inch plate film in a mid-20th-century Speed Graphic camera, all processed and printed by the photographer. Works from this series are in the collection of The Imperial War Museum and have been exhibited from Canada to Poland, with a special site-specific installation in a subterranean 1940s military bunker in the heart of Berlin.
‘Thousands still litter the coasts of Europe and its cities, with their concrete malevolence and like Crusader castles they will endure as salient talismans’ – Jonathan Meades, writer and presenter of the BBC series Concrete Poetry, quoted from the foreword to Blockhaus.
Name, Rank & Serial Number is Hunter’s homage to the last journey of the great uncle he never knew, John Gaffney, killed in action in Normandy on 22nd June 1944, aged 19. His only possession to return home was a metal-faced military watch. Using a 120 film format toy camera that leaks light, the motif of fogged edges gives an ethereal feel to images of lost youth. The 19 neon in the back room was created with students at The Academy of American Studies in Long Island City.
“They demonstrate the most moving aspect of that Normandy experience [-] that of a rustic countryside, albeit sewn with deadly fortifications everywhere’ – David Holbrook, D-Day veteran and Emeritus Professor of English at Downing College, Cambridge, in Name, Rank & Serial Number.”
