Champs de bataille

Presentation by Yan Morvan :

"Why and how to photograph the war?

Willingness to inform, to participate in the movement of history? How to tell the unbelievable - the images of horror follow the images of horror. The spectacularization of the world through television, the press, the Internet and real-time information has undermined our capital of empathy and our ability to be moved by the misery of others.

In 2004, with a 20 × 25 Deardorff photographic chamber, I began a series on battles fields. Did these places still tell the story?

Without giving in to the raw emotion, I wanted to address the conscience, to show by landscapes sometimes harmless a "geography" of the human dementia.

I was looking for another way of reflecting on the image and reality of war. I began to photograph the battlefields of France, the landing beaches, then those of Europe, our family that torn itself so often.

My project is ambitious: to show the land on which the men fought, to tell the story, to reflect on this thought of Heraclitus:
"Conflict / is the father of all beings, the king of all beings / To some he gave form of gods, to others of men, / He made some slave, others free." (Fragment 53) "It is necessary to know / that the conflict is common [or universal] / that the discord is the right / and that all things are born and die according to discord and necessity." (Fragment 80)

I traveled the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific Ocean, Africa, America, Asia. Some sites are well-indexed, well-marked, others deserve careful investigation and localization - some states do not seem eager to commemorate defeats or are amnesic ... "

Warning: this large format book also has a important number of pages, it is rather sizeable and heavy (4.5 kg / 10 lbs).

Texts (in French only) by Gaëlle Maïdon and Sarah Bertin

660 pages - Hardcover

Éditions Photosynthèses, 2015

Format : 26 x 32 cm

New - Mint condition