With this collage I wanted to create a journey so I use an image of outside a bunker, tore hole in it, stuck it onto an image of inside a bunker then stuck both onto a photocopy of an occupation newspaper.
For this montage I wanted to connect my images to the past so I found an archival image of a man possible a slave digging the bunker out, cut it up and then stuck bits of it to my own image
The occupation of the channel Islands lasted for five years from the 30th of June 1940 till their liberation on 9th May 1945. The whole occupation received little resistance however, it almost ended in near starvation in the last winter. Both Guernsey and Jersey’s civil courts were allowed to operate. They did change the time zone from GMT to CET and the rule of the road was changed to driving on the right. They allowed certain types of entertainment to continue like cinema and theatre, their marching bands even performed from time to time. Lil Dagover, a famous German actress of the time, even visited German troops in Guernsey and Jersey in 1944.
During the weekend I went to Corbiere light house to take pictures of the occupation bunkers up there. I thought since they had bunkers that were painted it’d be interesting to see what that’d look like once I’d edited the images into black and white.
After the shoot in Lightroom I edited my favourite images into black and white, adjusting some of the settings, and then cropped them.
Cropping is an important aspect when it comes to editing photos since it gets rid of unwanted areas within the image, improves the framing and accentuates/isolates the subject. Cropping allows the viewer to focus on the main features within the photo. By using the cropping tool in Lightroom I began to make some radical changes by selecting areas of my images for a different visual impact. Cropping can create drama in an image as well as making the composition more interesting than previously. Cropping can also decontextualise a subject within the frame which creates a great effect or can change the nature of an image radically.
black and white
I experimented with lightroom by changing a few images into black and white to link them to the type of photos they would have captured during World War 2. Viewers may have a different perspective on how they see a black and white image and may feel more somber as a result of the dark colour scheme. I used the preset B&W Sepia Tone since it brings a slight vintage feel to the image.
why use black and white?
colour
For the colour images I added the Matte filter. This filter makes the contrast subtle and the saturation lower than normal. These adjustments make the vibrance of the images less intense. I wanted my outcomes to have a vintage effect so that’s why I chose this specific filter for the colour images. Finally, I added grain to make the images appear like film.
why use colour?
The the photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise which consists of around 80,000 images dating back to the 1840s. This includes many different collection from different time periods, places on the island and different parts of history; including the occupation. This provides a very good understanding of what Jersey used to be like in both the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise was founded in 1873, to create not only a museum, but also a library. The Société Jersiaise opened its museum in 1877 and with collection of photographs already identified as a priority, these activities were continued as significant parts of the Société museum and library. Some of the first photos to be produced arrived in Jersey on the 9th of May 1840 and after nine months the Société Jersiaise first publicized it in the urban centers of England and France.
The archive contains examples of work by important early photographers such as Henry Mullins William Collie, Thomas Sutton and Charles Hugo. The collection also contains late nineteenth century collections of negatives by Jersey based photographers such as Ernest Baudoux, Albert Smith and Clarence Ouless. There were also very important twentieth century documents and images including a major archive collection of over 1000 negatives by Percival Dunham, Jersey’s first photo-journalist, as well as an archive of 1300 German Occupation images compiled by Emile F Guiton; the honorary Curator of the Société Jersiaise Museum and founder of the Photographic Archive. Public access to the archive was granted in 1992, and now contains online catalog with over 36,000 images that can be searched via a link online, as well as visiting the archive to view the images, negatives and original prints as well.
In order to make my photomontage images I printed out some of my own photographs and combined them with archive images found in the Jersey Evening Post. After this, I used tea to give the paper a brown colour that aged the images to look similar to authentic images from the 1940s.
Lightroom helps you import, organise, manage and find your images. Lightroom is a photo management and photo editing combined into a single tool.
I started experimenting with Lightroom by using my images from the Battery Moltke photo shoot. The steps below show how Lightroom is the best manipulation software for the selecting and editing process of images.
I started with my first edit, by simply flagging the different images as either rejected images of picked images. I then went on to rate the different images between 3 and 5 stars in order to decide which images to retouch. Any images 4 stars and above would be considered for retouching.
Here I experimented using black and white as well as using high contrast. I also adjusted the B&W color levels in order to help make the main subject stand out more.
In photo-montage I digitally recreated some of the photo-montage I created using my prints.
Battery Moltke is an uncompleted World War 2 coastal artillery battery in St Ouen in the North West of Jersey. It was constructed by Organisation Todt for the Wehrmacht during the Occupation of the Channel Islands. The site includes bunkers, gun emplacements and the Marine Pelistand 3 tower, which are located on Les Landes. The main purpose of the battery was to defend St Ouen’s Bay in case there was an attack by the Allies.
On permanent display outside is a heavy French First World War field gun, that has been restored and put back in its original emplacement having been recovered from the bottom of the cliffs at Les Landes by the Occupation Society in 1991. All of Jersey’s 29 heavy coastal artillery guns were dumped over the cliffs in a massive clean up operation ordered by the States of Jersey after the liberation whose demand was “We want this island cleansed of the taint of German Occupation”.
The MP3 tower is one of nine planned towers in Jersey, to observe targets at sea. The tower is located at the top of a steep, sloping, west facing cliff. It has seven floors including a windowless underground floor and a walled top deck where a Seetakt radar was located. MP3 can be visited on special guided tours of the Les Landes defenses which the CIOS conducts. The Channel Islands Occupation Society (CIOS) is a voluntary organization that wants to study all aspects of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands and raise awareness and educate the public about the Occupation during the Second World War.
On the 10thof June our class went on a photography trip to see the bunkers located at Battery Moltke. A CIOS member began the tour by giving us insight into what the German Occupation was like in Jersey. The tour guide showed us images from World War 2 and told us his experiences as a young boy after the war had ended. We also explored the principle bunker which had been turned into a museum. There were several underground tunnels connecting to rooms where the public could see objects that were used during the Occupation.