Reviewed: For Evermore: Fading Evidence of the Great War, Gallery of Photography until June 3rd
There is a utopian ideal underlying much of Western landscape art, whether manifested in the creation of paradisal gardens or in the evocation of an innocent, uncorrupted nature. From the picturesque to the sublime, landscape is a necessary space apart.
A large number of the landscape photographs in For Evermore at the Gallery of Photography allude to these aspects of the genre. Many of them are extremely beautiful images. Yet they depict a landscape that lost its innocence when it became a series of bloody battlefields during the first World War and the photographs are substantially about that loss.
Apart from Chris Harrison's rather in-your-face studies of war monuments in Britain and Ireland, the terrain covered is essentially a huge graveyard or, as described by historian John Keegan, the sepulture perpetuelle which became "an archipelago of gardened graveyards along the Western Front breathtaking in their beauty". That is to say, apart from the formal, marked graveyards where bodies were interred in the normal manner, tens of thousands of men were literally ground anonymously into the earth along this front, or, in the case of the Germans particularly, piled into mass graves. They are there still, although human remains have been periodically disturbed by farmers working the land.
It is easy to see why the most overworked metaphor in the photographs of Pater Cattrell and David Keith is an agricultural one. Orderly fields of wheat or maize, neatly scythed by mechanised harvesters, or reduced to rows of broken stubble, are a deceptively serene reminder of the mechanised slaughter of conscripted armies. There is a controversial vogue in contemporary curatorial practice for lengthy accompanying captions, so it is worth pointing out that in this case the captions are both functional and consistently enrich the work (credit here to curator Peter Neill). It is extraordinarily moving to look at calm, untroubled scenes, like the prospect from Vimy Ridge, or the still water of the Sambre Oise Canal on the Somme, and feel your perception of the image deepen and darken as you learn what unfolded there - all the more effectively because of the terseness of the accounts.
One central factor that differentiated the first World War from those preceding or succeeding it is that it ushered in the modern world. This is most evident in the brilliant work of French photographer J.S. Cartier. His stunning, black-and-white compositions, dark-toned and minutely detailed, bring us right into the grain of the landscape and reveal a strange, unexpected side to the conflict. It comes as something of a surprise - to me at any rate - to see the widespread use of reinforced concrete in the construction of strong points and bunkers.
The brutalist forms of modernist architecture are sketchily apparent in the roughly made buildings that still endure (the imprint of the shuttering still freshly apparent in the surface of the concrete, something frequently used as a design feature by architects to this day). So durable were they that some of them are even now employed, as sheds, by local farmers. Also rather shocking is the monstrous carapace of a cast-steel gun emplacement at Verdun, an extraordinarily modern-looking object.
All of this, together with the incredible level of industry and organisation evident in other fortifications, serves to underline the application of emergent technologies, something that accelerated as the war progressed, and has done so exponentially ever since.
Cartier also records a series of poignant relics in the form of carved images and inscriptions. They were cut directly into the stone of quarries used as bases by the soldiers of both sides. Some were official, consisting of regimental insignia, some very informal indeed, like the curvaceous Venus shaped by an American soldier. They occasionally recall prehistoric cave paintings in that they are an unexpectedly direct, human link to a remote reality. Keegan wrote of the pervasive smell of rust that hangs in the air on damp mornings, due to the quantities of barbed wire corroding in the earth. It is staggering to see, for example in a photograph taken at Guillemont in 1992, the quantities of ordnance that are still turning up.
Harrison's documentation of formal monuments are quite different in feeling: cool, hard and dispassionate. A view of the memorial at Sir Edward Lutyens's Park of Remembrance at Islandbridge is a reminder of the level of Irish involvement in the war, for so long ignored and resented in Ireland. Given that in the recent past there seems to have been a kind of sea change in attitudes to that involvement, this show is especially timely. Its elegiac title and subtitle allude to the slow disappearance of physical evidence, recorded in the pictures, as scars in the earth heal over. Even vast craters, like the Lochnagar Crater at La Boisselle on the Somme, which suggests a terrifying scale of destruction, begin to assume a natural, geological character, to become part of the landscape rather than interruptions in it.
But of course, besides direct physical evidence, the first World War is also fading from living memory. Surely, in any case, after a century of unparalleled human destructiveness, it can be regarded as child's play, as a primer in human folly? After all, horrific as its toll of 10 million dead may be, it was soon surpassed. Yet as a discussion reprinted in the show's catalogue makes clear, it remains a conflict apart, because it was unprecedented, because the world before and the world afterwards were radically different places - and we still inhabit the world it shaped. But apart altogether from the abstraction of large-scale history, the strength of this exhibition is that it is so intensely close, human and personal.
