The First World War, distant though it is, shaped the 21st century. I was interested to learn more about it in these past two years, as it’s been 100 years since the outbreak. The more that I read, the more I realized how little I understood about the war, as well as how little I learned about it in school. As I continue to seek new ways to use photography to convey information and tell stories, I decided to tell some of the story of the First World War.
I chose to focus mostly on the Western front, as it is the most iconic of the war. Still, there is something new to tell about it. The horror is often the only thing we remember of the war, but its depths are not commonly understood. Focusing on the Western front also provided me with a way to limit the scope of the work. If I had tried to focus on the entire war, I would be swamped with different stories. There would be no cohesive story because each front was almost entirely different, except that all created conditions I would never want anyone to find themselves in.
For the work itself, I decided to use rayograms (photograms). These allowed me to highlight the stark way in which we view the conflict. Since we are so far removed from the war, we see it starkly and with harsh edges, as if it were simple. I chose to pair this with the grey I included, showing that the war is not as simple as we think. Rayograms also forced me to think about composition and order, something the war struggled with. On the one hand, the soldiers that marched off to war in 1914 were the pinnacle of an ordered society in the OldWorld. But their order became chaos in the trenches. Lastly, rayograms allowed me to strip down the narratives and stories from the conflict into their base themes, or at least the themes I see in them. I did not want a completely objective view of the war, as I don’t believe that is possible. Plus, as the war continues to impact our lives even today, coupled with the lack of knowledge about it in the general public, I wanted to invite the viewer to interact with the pieces. I want them to question the work and test my understanding of it while building their own.
The objects I used to create my pieces were difficult to choose at first. Some are obvious choices, and others force the viewer to not worry as much about what it is. Throughout the piece, I wanted to move away from natural elements to entirely human-made pieces. This mirrors the Industrial Revolution and its application to war in the early 1900s. As humans realized their power to create, they got away from the natural world and also realized their power to destroy. I hope that my work can inspire people to ask questions about the history that continues to touch their lives, and to learn from the past.
