Above: Selected images from The Home Front. The Home Front exhibition at Impressions Gallery (2013) comprised 36 images. See Exhibitions list for details of further exhibitions. The most recent exhibition was at Farleys Gallery, Sussex in autumn 2020.
Project Background
The Home Front images, taken over a four year period (2009-12), reflect on ‘the perennial seductiveness of war’ analysed by Susan Sontag(I), but as experienced on the home front, rather than in the conflict zone. Through its focus on air shows, the work aims to inspire reflection on the normalisation of war in our culture – on how militarization is ‘woven into the fabric of civic culture’(II).
Air shows are a ‘fun day out’ for the family. On the ground, tank rides are on offer and armed forces’ recruitment drives afford children an opportunity to indulge in their fascination with guns. There are elements of fantasy and the carnivalesque here and a clear ‘disconnect’ between this ‘play’, and the actual effect of weapons. At air shows seductive civilian aircraft displays are interwoven with military; nostalgia for World War II is evoked by the presence of ‘war birds’ such as the Avro Lancaster bomber, followed by ‘shock and awe’ displays by contemporary fighter jets such as the Tornado, recently deployed in Libya and Afghanistan. As Robin Anderson writes in her book A Century of Media, A Century of War… “World War II has become the frame of reference that confers legimitacy to war (Intro, p. xxii)”.
In The Home Front photographs the beach and the landscape become uneasy spaces, temporarily ‘militarised’ by the fleeting presence and roar of fighter jets: the sky is ‘anything but reassuring’ as discussed by Dr. Pyrs Gruffudd(III) in his study of the loss of innocence of the sky following WWII. The context of an air show can differ radically: it may be merely entertainment for one, but can evoke fear and terrifying memories for another. One of the inspirations for The Home Front was the experience of Luarda, a four-year old Kosovar girl photographed in a Macedonian refugee camp for my earlier publication No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo. After being airlifted to the UK, Luarda was traumatised by her first experience of the Red Arrows flying over her new home, the town of Southport, Merseyside. ‘Luarda was terrified’, said her mother, Shqipe. ‘She pointed up at the planes and cried out “NATO! UCK!” We had to explain to the local people that we were from Kosova’. (No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo, Midnight Editions, 2001). There were several personal contexts such as this which inspired The Home Front, although the most compelling reason to focus on the military culture of air shows was as a critical background to the wars in which the UK government has been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The framework of The Home Front furthers my own engagement with war and the visual, as the theme of conflict seems to have pervaded all my projects since the mid 1990s: I, too, have been compelled by war. There are parallel links between the disruption by state violence into the domestic spaces of Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible, and in The Home Front the disruption of tranquillity and beauty by another form of violence, the display of military power by the state.
The book – 38 images – is not a catalogue of the exhibition, although it relates closely to the show. It includes a more extended sequence of landscape/’disrupted’ seascape images and has a different emphasis. The foreword (by Hilary Roberts of the IWM), essay (by Pippa Oldfield of Impressions Gallery), captions and notes all provide an important context to the staging of war as entertainment. In the gallery the images were contextualized by a caption list available to visitors, and by an introductory text panel. The large discrete spaces of the Impressions gallery exhibition, with its capacity for large scale images and their attendant detail, included a additional section on the more overt ‘marketing of war’: images from the DSEi arms fair, and from the trade days at the huge Farnborough and Le Bourget air shows (see below), which continue the theme of the staging of war.
Footnotes: (I) Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003:122 (II) Jody Berland and Blake Fitzpatrick in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies Number 23-24: 9, Cultures of Militarization (III) Dr. Pyrs Gruffudd: Reach for the sky: The air and English cultural nationalism in Landscape Research 16 (2), 1991:24)
Below:
MBDA Missile Systems stand, Paris air show (Le Bourget) 20 June 2011
POF (Pakistan Ordnance Factory) stand, DSEi arms fair, London 2011.
The Home Front book was published on 10 October 2013 Dewi Lewis Publishing (in association with Impressions Gallery). The Home Front was nominated for the Prix Pictet 2013 (Power) & 2014 (Consumption) and The Home Front publication was nominated (‘long list’) for the Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize 2015. A portfolio of The Home Front images, together with article, was published in the journal Photography & Culture (Routledge, Vol.8, Issue 3, Nov. 2015 & online in Feb. 2016). It was also featured in the British Journal of Photography’s special issue This is War (August 2014). See reviews tab for more, and the exhibitions tab for info on the tour.
‘...The work goes a long way to showing the everyday life of war. It’s a very good example of what Paul Virilio calls ‘Pure War.’ That is, war not as assault or the drama of the battlefield but as infinite preparation and a fact of civic culture. I value the work highly.’ Professor Blake Fitzpatrick, The School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto.
Link here to an excellent blog (The Nuclear Sublime, 30 September 2022) by Julian Stallabrass, reflecting on military culture, his memories of airshows and the sound of the Vulcan bomber: The Nuclear Sublime
For press reviews of The Home Front & more comments by academics, see Reviews tab on main menu above
Link to Impressions Gallery web page for The Home Front here