As part of the Occupation Vs Liberation side of our project we were given the opportunity to interview and photograph two occupation survivors. Friends, Hinault and Joyce De Le Haye came in and told us some personal stories of their experience of the occupation. While Joyce came off as rather shy, Hinault had no problem telling us about the time he tricked a German soldier into drinking too much cider.

‘I got a German soldier drunk.’

Hinault left school on his birthday when he was 14 years old to work as a Heard’s man on his father’s farm. It was his job to look after 20-25 cattle, only receiving help from his parents to milk them.

Once the occupation began farmers were forces to grow several ‘Vergies’ (areas of land) of wheat. During September the wheat would be harvested. At the time Hinault was too young to lift the harvested sacks of wheat so he was tasked to fill up jouts (2 gallons) with cider to give to the farmers. Everyday one German soldier would stand guard. One day a ‘young soldier with a nice personality’ stood guard. The soldier would always smile at Hinault when he walked past.

‘I wondered if I could roll this one over. I never distinguished if it was brave or foolish.’

The soldier, not used to drinking cider, kept accepting Hinault’s offers of more to drink. Before long the soldier was ‘flat on the floor’. Hinault went to tell father what he done immediately. However, Hinault’s father didn’t believe him, so Hinault took him to see his work. Upon, seeing that his son was telling the truth, he exclaimed in Jerais (Jersey-French), “The kid has got the Jerry drunk!” There was still a few hours until until the sacks of wheat were to be collected so the farmers took this as an opportunity to steal some to keep for themselves.

‘I was a hero as far they were concerned.’

The War Tunnels:

During the Occupation of Jersey, slave labours were used to build Jersey’s underground hospital. The Occupation ended before the tunnels could be fully completed. Now the tunnels are used a museum to attract tourists. While many of the exhibits are recreation of the original uses for the rooms, many simply inform about the Occupation as a whole.

Shoot:

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Image One:

Visual:

This image shows a display of several copies of The Jersey Evening Post from during the occupation. In the center of the image a news paper with the headline, ‘The Channel Islands Free Again,’ can be seen. This is the main focus of the image. Behind the display, the bottom half of an archive image is seen. This image shows an man in German uniform talking with a local shopkeeper.

Technical:

To take this image, I used an aperture of F/4, a shutter speed of 1/10 seconds and an ISO of 1600. A large ISO was required to compensate for the low lighting within the tunnels.

During editing, I mage the image black and white. This was to replicate the photos from the 1940s.

Image Two:

Visual:

This image shows a gun mounted to the wall as part of a display.

to capture this image, I used an aperture of F/4.2, a shutter speed of 1/100 seconds and an ISO of 1600.

Technical:

During editing I, again made this image black and white. I also added a dark vignette around the edge of the to draw attention to the gun in the center.

Image Three:

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Visual:

This image shows a flyer informing people about the importance of caring for evacuees. The flyer shows an image of a mother with three children stood next to a destroyed building, perhaps their former home.

Technical:

To take this image, I used an aperture of F/4, a shutter speed of 1/20 seconds and an ISO of 1600.

I wanted to keep this image in colour to show off the blue used as part of the flyer.

The Jersey Archive has been keeping the Island’s records since 1993. The archive is responsible for looking after and preserving States, public, church, business and club records. Currently it houses over 300,000 records, the oldest dating back to 1378. This equates to over 10 miles worth of records on over 180,000 people.

The purpose of our visit to the archive was learn more about how archives work and have the opportunity to research records from the German Occupation. While there, we were given a tour of the research room and the Strongrooms, where all the documents are kept. We went into the green and red Strongrooms which contained all of the written records.

Born in 1885, Francis Foot had shown a fascination with photography and early gramophones not long after he first began working. Foot was based on Pitt street where his parents had a shop selling gramophones. Many of Foot’s photographs were turned into postcards, excluding the portraits.

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Analysis:

Context/Concept:

From 1905 onward, Foot was a regular visitor to the Battle of Flowers. He was one of the first photographers of the event to focus his images on the audience rather than the floats and the impressively decorated area.

The Jersey Battle of Flowers is an yearly parade that takes place along Victoria Avenue. The first Battle took place in 1902 to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII. The Battle used to consist of removing flowers from their floats and throwing them into the crowd, however, this has since been stopped for health and safety reasons.

Visual:

This image shows a part of The Battle arena in which the audience and overhead decorations can be seen. Additionally, people on horseback can been seen walking through the arena. What is particularly interesting about the image is that none of the floats are shown. This is consistent with Foot’s other photographs of The Battle. The presence of people walking along the arena suggests that the photograph was taken at either the beginning or end of The Battle. However, due to the lack of flowers littering the floor, the start of The Battle is more likely.

Narrative:

Describe in:

3 words:

People and bunkers.

A sentence:

Showing the contrast between the people of Jersey and the Nazi bunkers.

A paragraph:

To show a contrast between the people of Jersey and the new bunker structures. I want to show how Nazi bunkers quickly became a common site along the Jersey coastline and how the Occupying forces integrated with what was already there.

Sequencing:

I wanted my zine to made up of montage images. These images would be a combination of my own bunker photographs and photos from the archive. I wanted to show that life under German rule gradually got harder for the Islanders as time progressed and I thought that best way to show this was to have my images n my zine to gradually get more and more violent. I couldn’t really violence in my own images as they only show the now, no longer weaponized remains of German fortifications, so I had to do this in the archive images I combined them with.

A zine is a book made from a collection of photographs presented in a often magazine style. They can be used as a way to present a series of images from a project or to tell a story. Many zine are hand made, therefore each zine is unique to the photographer.

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Unknown Quanties:

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Unknown Quantities is a collection of zines from four different photographers, Olivia Arthur, Dominic Nahr, Moises Saman and Peter Van Agtmael. Each zine documents the time the photographer spent in a developing country. However, each focuses on very different political issue.

Arthur spent her time in Saudi Arabia, documenting the lives of women there and how they are mistreated. Nahr shows the uprising against former Egyptian president, Mubarak. Saman combines his own images with government images from the civil war in Libya. While Van Agtmael stays slightly closer to home, combining images from Iraq, Afghanistan and the USA.

The zine collection is presented in a small folder, similar to that used to file official government documents. This shows that the zine are focusing on important political issues. Is also gives a professional and serious feel that empathises the importance of the issues raised in within the folder.

Read more about the zine here:

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.

Visit:

Battery Lothringen is the largest German battery on the Island with a total of four gun positions. Like its namesake, SMS Lothringen, the battery was set up similarly to that of a naval battle ship and run by the invading navy unit. The first part of the battery was completed in 1941 and continued to function until liberation on May 9th 1945.

After liberation the people of Jersey wanted all trace of Nazi rule removed or covered up. This included Battery Lothringen. In March 1946, Lothringen’s four guns and anti-aircraft guns were removed by the British Army and disposed of over the cliffs at Les Landes. These guns would later be recovered, restored and returned to the battery. Much of the bunker systems were also filled in with dirt, but were again later dug up and restored.

Tuesday 18th June 2019:

The visit to Battery Lothringen could be considered a complete success if you completely ignore that fact that it rained nearly the entire time we were there.

When were arrived at the battery we were introduced to Tony Pike of CIOS. Tony explained the history behind Lothringen and talked us through the four gun positions and the purpose of each of the bunker structures on the site. We were then given the change to wander around the site and conduct our photo shoot before meeting up in the car park to then head into one of the bunkers. Once inside we were again given free reign and allowed to look around, read the information panels and take more photographs. After lunch, it was still raining, so we requested that the coach come earlier to take us back to school.

Shoot:

After importing all my images into Lightroom, I began to look through my image to decide which ones were the best. To start i picked images that looked and good. I rejected images that were out of focus, over/under exposed or that I simply didn’t like.

Next, I took a closer look at my images and selected images that would be most useful for the ‘Bunker Archaeology’ project. I condensed my selection down to 8 images that I definitely wanted to try and use.

Images:

To capture my images I used an aperture of F/8, an ISO of 200 and a shutter speed of 1/80secs. I made all the images black and white in order to to give the images a more dramatic look and to fit with the colourless images of the 1940s.