About the Work
The subtitle for this work is 'still life', and it came about as a result of a planned visit to see where my grandfather and my ex-wife's grandfather died as a result of the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. This is not so much of a coincidence as it would appear, as this part of the Western Front saw the most appalling carnage that the British Army has suffered before or since.
'In Flanders Fields' was laid out straight with no cropping of the photographs, unlike 'The Wailing Wall', in which the photographs were fitted together more pictorially. Here, the intention was to subordinate the look of the piece to some form of unbending order of events, externally imposed.
The complete work took approximately four hours to shoot on a late September day. The weather changed during the sequence, and I finished just in time to escape a thunderstorm, the threatening nature of which may be seen in the top right hand corner of the piece.
I hoped that the segments of people, including myself, moving around between the gravestones, would say something about the temporality of life
″I still use the same approach to my work: I get an idea, think of the title and then make the work. So not much has changed since 1964″
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