Icarus
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# Posted: 5 Aug 07 15:49
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For this week's photo up for discussion, Geoffrey has already done me a great favour with what he wrote in his introduction last week. I only need to echo what he, then many commenters, said about photos with a power to "speak", to reveal aspects of life beyond the aesthetically appealing. Those that can make up stop and think about complex, abstract matters that may be part of, or outside, our individual life experiences, but that nevertheless are connected to us all - even if we can't see how.
These matters certainly raise many worthwhile, often unanswerable questions of any person who goes around with any camera and who is motivated by a desire to understand who we are and why. And how we arrived at today.
For me, Wim Denijs, of Flanders, Belgium, in thw works that he brings us on Woophy, and the Wim that I have recently exchanged ideas with in private, is precisely this kind of photographer, and - more importantly - this kind of human being. All his photos radiate an abiding concern for humanity. He and I both click our shutters in very different ways, (with a great gap in quality!), but I believe that we are both motivated by the same drives in our natures and, to a certain extent, similarities of experience. More than once, I have left him a comment that it feels to me absurd and morally wrong to classify some of his pictures with a rating and one adjective. But his photography alwasy makes me think and feel!
The shining example that i present to you for discussion is one that, had I been there, I would have shot. When I was there, however, in August 2000, the sun shone all day long.
Ieper.
We don't see the wide expanses of Flanders fields. Instead an almost claustrophibic confinement, in strong, contrasting tones of grey. 2 elements; stone and clouds.
No human life to be seen, but in the narrow space between the black, arched frame, one senses the presence of millions; the young lives physically and mentally mutilated and destroyed by an excess of mankind's worst deficiencies, malaises and failures.
One senses, moreover, the presence of millions of ghosts of men and boys who suffered appalling deaths in these fields and many others over 4 years of war.
Seeing no people suggests that these dead, and their ultimate sacrifice, are largely forgotten and neglected today, filed away in the dust of history.
The sky, in contrast, looks so full of anger, power, motion, dominating the scene that it seems like somewhere, beyond this earth, they are not forgotten, none of that monstrosity is forgotten, and neverwill be.
This is Ieper (in Flemish), Ypres (in French), an old venerable town of artists and crafstmen, as well as farmers, which after 4 years of bombardment had not a single building left standing. A place that found itself a vctim of geographical, political and historical circumstances - and collective madness. To most of the many hundreds of thousands of British and Canadian soldiers who fought there during the entire First World War, the majority of whom had never left their home towns before, many of whom would never go home, this town was Wipers (pronounced in English as "Waipers"). Shot, blown to oblivion, disappeared by drowning in the mud....without being able to pronounce the name of the place where their bodies remained in pieces.
There is a bizarre, striking coincidence that I have only just realised. Today (as I write this, pre-posting) is August 4th. It is 93 years to the very day that Britain declared war on Germany, due to its guarantee of Belgium's neutrality. And so that 4 years of nightmare began.
Forget? I can't, for many reasons that I will not go into.
Wim, thank you for this sadly necessary, powerfully eloquent piece of photographic brilliance. All credit to you.
Fellow-woophers, i would just ask you, what did Ieper/Ypres/Wipers mean to you, 93 years later, BEFORE you saw this photo and read my necessarily long explanation?
And what you think about the photo. Yes, it raises complex, abstract matters for discussion: life; death; sacrifice; war; futility; past; present; future; the value of a great photo (accomplishment?).
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