The project Dans le Noir (in the dark) is focused on a diary of a woman called Odette Brefort who lived under German Occupation in Deauville during World War 2. Odette was a young woman who had become a member of the French resistance. Lynda Laird chose to use just one day of her diary, the day of the D Day landings, 6thJune 1994. She used her diary entry and photographed the German surveillance bunkers along the Normandy coast.
She chose to photograph them in infrared film which was a technology created by military in World War 2 to detect camouflage, so it picks up a visual spectrum invisible to the naked eye showing up anything that’s dead as black and anything alive as pinks and reds. Something the German soldiers did was paint trees onto the buildings and bunkers they occupied along the coast to disguise them, but this film exposes it.
Lynda Laird printed the infrared images onto silk and stitched them around the edges, a reference to another technology that was first used in WW2 where silk escape maps were stitched inside the paratrooper’s uniforms. She also found some drawings that Odette had made. They were maps informing on the Germans positioning throughout Deauville and the nearby town Trouville that she sent to the Resistance in Paris. These also formed part of the Installation.
Extract from Odette’s diary:
Oh, what a night! My little head is all shell-shocked.
Since midnight it’s been impossible to sleep: the humming from planes, the anti-aircraft bombs, the machine gun noise.
I went downstairs because I couldn’t sleep and after 15 minutes it went quiet. Thinking it would be better, I went back to bed. What a mistake!
All night, the humming from planes, it was non-stop.
What a joy when waking this morning, someone announces there was a landing at Dives.
At 8.20am a bomb falls on the Printemps store, another one on the Normandy.
By rule we don’t have the right to leave Deauville, or to ride our bicycles.
The weather remained foggy until midday, the sun shone from 4pm. It must be the English who brought the clouds! The defence volunteers will be able to move freely tonight.
Around 6pm, what a tremendous bang! it is the Mont Canisy. The English navy must have blown up a large artillery battery that was shooting at them. It had been deafening us since this morning. I think the shot hit the target, as we can’t hear a thing anymore.
What on earth will happen to us when the Navy and Air Force take care of our region?
There is no electricity. Deauville is in the dark.
—Odette Brefort, 6 June 1944