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B+WTHE KILLING FIELDS
Unable to express his feelings about the horror and tragedy of the First World War
in conventional terms, photographer Brett Killington set about portraying
the landscape in a way that reflects the lived experience. Steve Pill reports.FEATURE
All images
© Brett KillingtonA
n anniversary is
traditionally a cause for
celebration, but when it
comes to marking the
passage of time since a
tragic event, things can be
far more complicated. Photographer Brett
Killington is five years into a personal
project that documents the battlefields
and tunnels of World War I, but his
initial motivation was a desire to offer an
alternative perspective on the conflict. ‘I
wanted to create a body of work that doesn’t
sit comfortably with the current lexiconof centenary images,’ he says. ‘Too many
landscape images have been taken that
romanticise the event, which is far from the
truth of what took place in these locations.’
The New Zealander’s two-part Project
WW1 does no such thing. The Below
Ground portfolio documents the French
tunnels dug during the Great War in muted
colours, the graffiti and rusting tin helmets
providing a very tangible and humane
reminder of the thousands of lives lost.
The monochrome Above Ground series,
meanwhile, offers an altogether more
haunting vision. The extra-long pinhole
exposures add a hazy, dream-like quality
to these nondescript and overgrown
landscapes, while also being suggestive
of the fug of artillery fire and tear gas
that soldiers might have seen from the
trenches. ‘Above ground the evidence of
this war has all but disappeared. Years of
effort have restored farmland and woods.
Just documenting this landscape with a
conventional camera can never convey
what went on. I wanted my images to
reflect the landscape that the soldiers
experienced and give a sense of the conflict
and what they saw from their shell holes.’B
rett’s project began during a VW
Campervan holiday in France. His
wife Joyce came across a brochure
that mentioned a tunnel system
under the northern French city of Arras
that was dug by the New Zealand Engineers
Tunnelling Company between 1916 and 1918.
Given that the photographer’s grandfather
had fought at the Battle of the Somme
and his great-uncle was also killed during
the war, he was inspired to explore this
unexpected link to his homeland further.
The New Zealand historian Christopher
Pugsley helped Brett gain access to Arras,
the first of dozens of trips to sites across
France and Belgium. ‘Networking has
been a major part of this project,’ he says.
‘There are many books and maps on the
subject. It’s great to turn up in a city, town
or village and just explore.’
The search for battlefields then began
in the downtime between tunnel visits.
Research trips to local museums also shed
light on the conflict and, in two cases, led
to forthcoming exhibitions in the Belgian
towns of Passchendaele and Messines.
To create the Above Ground images,
the 51-year-old photographer sets up his
pinhole camera in the surrounding woods‘I wanted my images to
refl ect the landscape that
the soldiers experienced
and give a sense of the
confl ict and what they saw
from their shell holes.’
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