Luke Watson – Victory for the Fallen

Victory for the Fallen

Victory for the Fallen follows the locations of soldier-poets such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon across a small part of the Somme region in Northern France. In photographing the areas these men lived and fought through one of history’s bloodiest battles, I wanted to portray the emotions from 1916 alongside the contemporary landscape mirroring the epitaph written by John Maxwell Edmonds:

When you go home, tell them of us and say,
For their tomorrow we gave our today.

Shooting in an area that saw so much conflict in the 1900s, I felt that the project was always going to be about life and death, but I had few ideas on how that would manifest in the work. Having done my dissertation on First World War trench photography I had picked up an array of facts and figures; digits that were meant to indicate scale and tragedy fell short of their descriptive potential as I regurgitated them paragraph after paragraph. By far the more compelling aspect was the photography and the stories that the soldiers captured on their rolls of 127 film. Seeing the images, produced first-hand by the men in the trenches, drew me to the soldiers’ lives and helped put the ‘digits’ into perspective. The reality of words written in diaries and letters to loved ones was too powerful to ignore and in a similar vein as the photographs, the literature was a window into the feelings of the individuals from the moment they were made. This literature is spliced into the project in the form of poetry written in or about the areas I visited.

Along with money from my late Gran, to whom this work is dedicated, I was fortunate enough to be awarded funding from The Janet Trotter Trust which went a long way towards the cost of travel and film; without which the project wouldn’t have been possible. Prior to departure, researching the history was the most intricate part of the process but also the most crucial. Identifying the poets and selecting texts to form the narrative, finding battalions and the locations from 1916 war records all enabled me to plan routes and learn more about the landscape that I would be travelling across. Memorising the poetry meant that I was able to recite the words as I walked through the battlefields to help visualise the written component of the work.

Having to cut my trip short, I feel there are more images to be made before I can say the work is finished. I would like to travel back to the Somme to photograph in the near future and experiment with different ways of presenting the images and literature in tandem.

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