Glorification of war?
As Asher has used my unguarded comment on Cem's photographs in the bunker to get this thread running, I feel that I must come back and comment. Please note that, as a new member, I am hesitant to do so.
To begin with, I feel that Cem was using the interesting textures and forms which he found inside the old WW2 bunker just to create good images. I may have misunderstood, but I don't feel that he was trying to make any historical/ethical points about the bunker as an image of WW2 - though he did comment on the visual brutalism. Forgive me if I have misunderstood - my wife says that I am autistic and cannot understand emotions properly!
Do war memorials glorify war? Well, at one time they probably did, or at least were intended to glorify victory - not quite the same thing. I am thinking primarily of Trafalgar Square in London, named after Admiral Nelson's critical victory. His statue overlooks the Square from atop his column, at the base of which are 4 lions, cast (it is said) from captured enemy guns. In the Square are statues of King George and a couple of generals who are now only remembered by historians. When Trafalgar Square was created it was undoubtedly meant to celebrate victory in war, but now it is just a place where Londoners come to party on special nights or rally in political protest meetings. There is one empty plinth, originally intended for a fourth statue of some military hero. After a vigorous campaign a couple of years ago, a temporary statue of Sir Keith Park, the RAF officer who successfully controlled the air defences of London and the south-east during the Battle of Britain, was allowed to occupy the 'fourth plinth' for 6 months, before the empty plinth again reverted to being a place for transient displays of modern art.
The directors of virtually all war museums will strenuously deny that their museum 'glorifies war'. The present attitudes are to emphasize the waste and suffering of war - even though a museum full of tanks, guns and aircraft may be quite exciting to schoolboys not yet mature enough to know of the suffering.
Some buildings are deliberately preserved as memorials of the destruction. At Auschwitz-Birkenau there is an emphasis on the human scale of the suffering, as may also be the case at most of the other memorials to the Holocaust. Other iconic buildings serve also as reminders of the physical destruction of precious heritage: the Genbaku Dome in the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima, the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirke ruins in Berlin and the ruins of St Michael's, the Old Coventry Cathedral.
In the case of WW2 bunkers, like the one that Cem used for his photography, there is a grey area of passive preservation. It is right that major installations like these, and the Nazi Army's great gun emplacements along the Atlantic coast of Europe, should be preserved and used to help young people understand our violent past. But is is a grey area, because many of these massive concrete and steel structures survive just because it is not worth the trouble of demolishing such bomb-resistant bunkers, etc. The countryside of much of Europe and elsewhere is still littered with little bunkers that are a bit of a nuisance to farmers, etc, but too difficult to demolish. Now there is a move to record, and in some cases, to preserve these minor relics of war. In Britain there are two major groups who are recording as many of these smaller bunkers and other defensive works as possible, and their web-sites include many photographs of these "pill-boxes" and similar structures that are classed as "hardened field defences" in an excellent article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_hardened_field_defences_of_World_War_II
The British groups that are recording and photographing these and other bunker-type remnants are:
http://www.pillboxesuk.co.uk/
and
http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/sitemappage.htm
Each of these groups have a large archive of photographs - but they are technical records of our wartime past, and not 'art' photography, which I believe is the primary interest of OPF.
For the very best wars, the one's in medieval England and France, the armies stopped for the evening and then might even have some officers of the other side as guests for a banquet dinner. At dawn, the armies, resplendent in their uniforms, reformed battle lines and following signals from the generals of each side, safely on hilltops, butchered each other once more!
Asher
Alas, Asher, you have a rose-tinted view of mediaeval warfare: the story of knightly chivalry that we were all taught in school. I am currently reading Barbara Tuchman's brilliant review of the horrors of the fourteenth century: "A Distant Mirror". It is clear that knightly chivalry was a brutal self-centred pride in which the nobility despised the commoner. The battle of Poiters was an English victory only because the French nobility refused to let the common hired crossbowmen fire at the Engish, for fear that it would impair the honour due to the French knights and nobles when they went into the battle. If any mutual honour was shown, it was only to other nobles with whom one (temporarily) wanted to have good relations with. Page 8: "These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. Abbot Guibert claimed that in the mad war of Enguerrand against the Lorrainer, captured men had their eyes put out and feet cut off with results that could still be seen in the district in his time." Tuchman's fine, and very readable, book is full of examples of the barbarism that was an essential part of knightly 'chivalry' in the middle ages.
Sorry to witter on with this digression. It is a huge topic, big enough for a book or an international symposium. I am not at all sure that it is appropriate for OPF. Forgive me.
Martin
