


Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I’m trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn’t, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click....
Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban
I’m not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I’d start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just...
Mystery: Albert and the returning troops 1916
A mystery photo. Last week Bethan Holdridge who works for the Museums service in Norwich invited me to have a look through her Great Grandfather – Oliver Isaac Brown’s collection of photos. He was a Suffolk man but lived in Great Yarmouth. A sapper in the Royal...
Vanishing Point: Thiepval
72,191 names. Rising up as it does above the trees on the Thiepval ridge on the Somme, it is by turns a beautiful, vast and horrifying edifice of brick and stone, coloured like blood and bone. A list, a huge frightening and sobering list. The number of names, the...
Colourising: The Great War
A couple of years ago I did a series of these, mainly individual soldiers from my private collection of postcards, I also did a few of these, now ubiquitously crayoned in, see ’em everywhere type images, so I thought I might as well add my favourites to the...
Vanishing Point: The Redoubt
There are areas of the Somme where you can really feel the past; where the landscape whilst modified hasn’t been essentially changed. This is one of those places. What remains isn’t difficult to spot and is easy to get too a walk down a grass clotted, tyre...
Vanishing point: The Leaning Madonna
She’s not leaning anymore obviously, originally designed by sculptor Albert Roze and dubbed the ‘Golden Virgin’ – she stands holding aloft a golden baby Jesus on the very top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières in the middle of Albert....
Vanishing Point: The Somme still flows – Schwaben redoubt
I’ve been distracted enough not to put fingers to keyboard for the last week or so. Mainly because I had an upcoming trip to France, my first on my own due to some fairly uncontrolled sets of human circumstance and how time plays its stupid games. Travelling...