The channel islands were the only part of Britain to be under the occupation of the Nazis, and after 5 years the island was liberated on the 9th May 1945. The Nazis invaded Jersey one week after the British government demilitarised the island, as they feared the safety of the people in the event of conflict. The Germans were not aware of this, and heavily attacked the island. 10 people were killed and many were also wounded.
Under the command of the Nazi soldiers, life became very different for the citizens of Jersey. A shortage of fuel meant that horse and cartridges were used instead of cars, and the soldiers forced people to drive/ride on the opposite side of the road. People had to also get used to living with limited amounts of information as radio sets became banned. Some islanders risked hiding them, and took it upon themselves to spread news about what was happening on the frontline to others.
There was a shortage of many supplies on the island during this time. Islanders became smart at coming up with substitutes for things they no longer had access to. Sea water was commonly used as salt, and parsnip paired with sugar beet replaced tea. The SS Vega was a relief ship provided by the Red Cross that saved the starving islanders. The ship arrive on December 30th, providing the people of Jersey with food and much needed medical supplies that the island was in desperate need of.
Hitler ordered that Jersey should become a fortress which no one could get into. May slave workers from places like Spain, Russia, Poland and France built many bunkers and tunnel systems which are still around to this day. one of the most prominent fortification is HO8, which has now been converted into the Jersey War Tunnels where visitors can go and experience what life was like for islanders under the occupation. There are also many fortification sites around Jersey’s coasts, especially in St Ouens.
The Jersey war tunnels website contains a variety of interesting stories passed down through families about the occupation. They’re all very interesting as they’re all about what ordinary citizens went through in their lives. Below is one a story taken from the website which I found particularly interesting:
Unsung heroes
As German forces advanced relentlessly through northern France into Normandy and Brittany, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were trapped with their backs to the sea. The British Admiralty organised a rescue mission – often called ‘Little Dunkirk’ – to evacuate them from French ports, including St Malo, 50 miles south of Jersey.
Dunkirk had shown that small boats would be an important part of the operation; they could pick up troops in shallow water, then take them to larger transport ships anchored in deeper water. So on the 16th June 1940 the Admiralty sent a Telegram to Jersey’s Lieutenant Governor requesting that “… Jersey send all available craft to St Malo to help the evacuation of British troops from there…”
– Taken from the Jersey war tunnels website, full story here.
On may 8th 1945, in Winston Churchill’s famous speech, he mentions:
“and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today.”
Jersey people only officially knew the war was over, the following day when the HMS beagle was seen in St Aubin’s harbour. On May 9th at 7:15, the instrument of surrender was signed on behalf of the German command of the Channel Islands. All German flags in the Channel Islands were then lowered. On the arrival of the liberators, the swastika that was hanging on the Pomme D’Or hotel was taken down and replaced by a union jack at 3:40 showing the end of the occupation. The crowd gathered then began singing the national anthem. This day is still celebrated every year in Jersey with a bank holiday.
On a day out for a photography trip, we went to Batterie Moltke in St.Ouens, and visited the German sites built across the coast. This included bunkers and gun emplacements which were used in the war. During this time we were taken on a tour where we learnt the history of these places and were shown pictures taken back when the second world war was still happening in Jersey, which was an interesting experience.
About Battery Moltke:
Battery Moltke located at Noirmont Point on the Channel Island of Jersey and was built by the German army in 1942.
French Guns from 1917 were re-used by the Germans and placed there. They were placed in open concrete posts and were able to defend St. Ouen Bay. They were also able to engage targets on the rest of the island.
In August 1944, the alarm went off in the gun battery when the British destroyer HMS Onslaught, in process of attacking a German convoy, came within range of the battery. Along with 3 other gun batteries, the Germans opened fire and HMS Onslaught withdrew.
After the war, the British dismantled the guns and threw them out over the cliffs. They have since been restored and are on display today.
Contact sheets of photos taken at Battery Moltke:
Using Lightroom, I took these images and went through a selection process to see which images I would be willing to use for the theme.
Process:
The first step o my selection process is that I go through each image one by one and flag them. The images which are marked with the black flag with the cross means that i’m not interesting in using it, while images with the white flag means that there is a chance that I could use them at some point. I’m doing this to just narrow down my options to find my final few images which i’m sure that I will use.
The second process I went through is that I rated the images which I flagged white, with starts going from 1 to 5 on how much I like them. I mainly used 2 and 3 stars though, and didn’t rate the ones which I didn’t like. I then went and colour coded them, with the colour yellow meaning that I might use it and with green meaning there is a big chance I will use it.
With the filter functions, I can separate the colour coded images. So when i want to see my images which are colour coded yellow or green I can turn the filter on and make my selection from that.
For my A2 theme in photography, I will be looking at the German Occupation and the war. To start off my project, we went to the Société Jersiaise to look deeper into the war and to look at interesting pictures taken during the time.
The story of Jersey’s occupation:
The German Occupation of Jersey began one week after the British Government had removed all military forces from the island, fearing the safety of the people who lived there. On the 28th of June, the German air force bombed and machine-gunned multiple sites on the island, not knowing of the demilitarization. The attacks killed 10 people and wounded many more. A few days later, on the 1st of July, Germany dropped an ultimatum from the air demanding the immediate surrender of the island. White flags and crosses were placed in prominent places, and later that day Jersey was taken over by air-borne troops.
With the Germans in power, supplies ran out and left the soldiers and the civilians with very little to make use of. Food shortages on Jersey were finally relieved by the arrival of the Red Cross ship SS Vega, bringing food parcels to Jersey. Before then, substitutes had been used to replace everyday foods, with seawater replacing salt, for instance, and a mixture of parsnip and sugar beet replacing tea. A Red Cross relief ship arrived in Jersey on 30 December with food parcels, and cases of salt, soap and medical supplies. The visits of the Red Cross ship proved a lifeline to the starving islanders.
Hitler ordered the conversion of Jersey into an impregnable fortress. Thousands of slave workers from countries like Russia, Spain, France, Poland, and Algeria built hundreds of bunkers, anti-tank walls, railway systems, as well as many tunnel complexes. All of the fortifications built around the island were part of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall”. Today, traces of Jersey’s defenses and wartime occupations can be discovered across the island, especially in St. Ouen’s Bay.
The occupation of Jersey lasted for 5 years, starting from 1st of July 1940, and eventually ended on the 9th of May 1945.
To gain some start photos for this theme and to give me an idea of what I could do, I went around town and took images of things which were either part of the war, or places which pictures were taken of during the war which are still there now.
Cropping is an important aspect when it comes to editing photos as it can cut out any unwanted factors within your images and make your viewers focus on the things which you want them to focus on.
Image number 1:
I chose this image to start with. This image was taken at Battery Moltke within the underground hallways where the ammo for the guns were kept.
After selecting the crop tool, I pulled the sides in to crop out the stuff I didn’t want. I want the viewers to focus on the hole in the wall, so I cropped out most of the wall around it, leaving in some of the dents and scratches to keep it interesting.
This was my final image after cropping it. However, I still thought that there was too much wall in the image which took the attention away from the hole, so I decided to go back to the crop tool to see if I could make it any better.
A good thing about the crop tool in lightroom is that even after you’ve cropped it, it still keeps the original image for you so if you do want to go back and make changes, it has the whole image left for you just in case. I went and pulled the box more inwards, stopping just at the dent which is in the bottom right side of the image.
After our visit to Noirmont and producing some black and white edits I moved onto physically editing the photographs in the form of photo-montage. I used a mixture of archival and my own image experiments to create the montages by physically merging the photographs together.
Photomontage Experiment 1
Above shows my first experiment with photo-montage, I used two of my own photographs to generate this final product. I wanted to create the illusion of the structure coming out of the sea. This showing the impact of the use of the water that was used to keep the island under occupation and how it was the German Navy here as well as Soldiers. I feel this experiment went well and I like how that it merges together which is why I chose to use two black and white images so that it would merge easily into one.
Photomontage Experiment 2
Above shows my second photo-montage experiment, this time using an archival image of the houses and my own image produced at the sight of Noirmont. I like how the archival image was in black and white and my own was in colour as I feel it shows the contrast and makes them stand apart from each other. Although the archival image is from a different place in Jersey and doesn’t necessarily show the buildings related to the occupation I feel I wanted to make a photo-montage of the houses coming out of the water as a hint towards the people are still here with these structures and their houses which were also under occupation.
Photomontage Experiment 3
Above shows my last photo-montage experiment, this one I wanted to try something a little different to the last two and I used only archival images to produce this one. I have chosen to have the figure leaning on top of one of the air-raid shelters. I don’t have a clear understanding of who the large figure in the photograph is but my aim was just to try generate the concept of that someone was always in control or on top watching down especially during the occupation, the people of jersey were always being controlled.
Archives are where memories are stored and history is made. An archive can be a collection of historical records or the place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have been collected over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime. They are kept to show past events and can help to show whether these were successful or not. Archivists identify and preserve these documents because of their enduring cultural and historical value. Archives can come in a wide range of formats including written, photographic, moving images, sound, digital and analogue. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique. This means that archives are different from libraries with regards to their functions since books have many identical copies. Archives are important because they can take us much deeper into an event rather than reading a book based on a secondary account of what happened.
The photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise contains over 100,000 images from the mid 1840s to the present day. It is the principal Jersey collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography. As Jersey is located between Britain and France (two nations who pioneered photography) the Island has a rich history of photographic practice. The collection has a detailed visual record of developments in Jersey’s landscape and history throughout the photographic era.
The text ‘Archives, Networks and Narratives’ explains how museums aim to serve particular interests, whether it be personal or cultural. Museums are repositories of cultural memories of the past and organize historical narratives of culture. Photography performs a double role within museums because photographs can function as both an artefact on display and as a way to collect the museum and its artefacts, since the photograph is a form of archive. The photographer Roger Fenton was employed to document the British Museum’s artefacts. His photographs create an impression of how it was to see these objects in the Victorian era. With time, his photographs have become famous and feature in museum exhibitions as artefacts.
Contemporary artists and photographers bring new types of imagery to the archives of museums. They contribute different types of images, narratives and aspects of culture, which can be seen in Hiller’s work. After historical events, archives can become a resource so people can rethink what happened. While we tend to think of museums as orientated towards collecting the past, they are also focused towards the present and future.
‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artists’ by Susan Hiller is a collection of around 300 postcards of the coast around Britain. Each postcard presents an image of waves crashing over different parts of the coastline. The images are displayed in grids and have become part of an archival display of how culture sees itself. Together the postcards create an image of Britain being repeatedly attacked by the sea which could metaphorically stand for an invasive force or power. It may also represent an emotional threat by a person or idea where one must create defenses. Hiller celebrates the authors of the postcards which raises the question of their status within culture and social memory. Hiller’s work seems to question whether the postcard images tell us anything important about our popular concept of the British Isles.
Tracey Moffatt’s series ‘Something More’ presents a fictionalised biographical story of a young Aboriginal woman’s desire to leave her rural life for the city. The background is clearly painted and has a theatrical scene of a rough cabin inhabited by rugged figures, with others in the background. They all stare at a woman in the foreground, who seems indifferent to them. Her urban elegance and dress sets her apart, and she appears to be pondering her future. The following pictures show that this is a disturbing story which ends in violation and death. Moffatt’s early work often takes the form of fictionalised reenactments of personal memories. The National Gallery of Australia now owns this work and has found its way into a national archive. This Aboriginal story of desire and social violence creates an understanding of the past within the present.
The role of Archives has also changed because of new technology. The speed and quantity of visual recording is better today with the internet and the wide availability of camera phones. Nowadays it is easy to send pictures and have access to archives. Anyone can send pictures and texts to others online relating to their social or personal experience. Photography lets anyone collect anything as part of a personal online collection. The internet has not only given more access to archives but has also changed what we think an archive is. However, technology has caused problems with people losing their images by changing their storage systems, losing pen drives etc.
In 1995 the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described ‘archive fever’ as a conflict with the idea of conservation. Conservation is driven by the possibility of forgetting. Since human memory is limited and not everlasting, photographs are associated with the idea of remembering and the desire to return. William Henry Fox Talbot anticipated the purpose of photography as an archival practice, but now photography is clearly a highly popular way to record moments. The human memory is complex and can fuse or compress separate moments together. Turning memories into documents, texts, images and objects, relieves the human brain of the difficulty of recording or remembering things accurately.
Overall archives have a variety of purposes. An educational purpose would be to admire historical artefacts and to gather information from the past. A personal purpose would include storing memories, such as important family events to be kept as a momento. I have learnt the importance of questioning the archival material such as the accuracy of the information, if it might have been influenced by someone’s personal viewpoint, as well as considering what has been left out. Although we are reliant on technology for our personal and public archives, it is important to view photographic archives and museums as an important source of historical material. During my visit to Société Jersiaise, I learnt about the importance of archival photographs. They open a window into the past and give a glimpse of what people’s lives were like during the occupation, as well as showing temporal changes. I am going to use the Jersey archives to enrich my personal study as I am interested in focusing my investigation upon the coastline of Jersey and how it has changed since the Occupation.
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist and aesthetic philosopher, who was born 1932 in France. According to two geographers, Virilio was a ‘historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass-media and human-machine relations .
Paul Virilio was born and raised on the Northern coast of France. The Second World War created a big impact of his city, and his own life. His city was bombed and held captive by the German Navy. In 1958, Virilio conducted a phenomenological (he science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.) where he looked at military space and bunkers built by the Nazi’s during the Second World War.
In ‘Bunker Archaeology‘ the urban philosopher and cultural theorist turns his attention- and camera- to the ominous, yet strangely compelling German bunkers from WW II that lie abandoned on the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompt Virilio to consider the nature of existence and war, in relation to both the Second World War and contemporary times.
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio
I find Paul Virilio’s work quite interesting due to the almost silent feel that the photographs have and the stillness involved with them. I find them to be quite haunting and I feel that them also being in black and white with little to no human figures in them plays a big part in creating this sense about the photographs.
Below the photographs shows a bunker left and half buried in the sand with little to nothing left, it’s not right in the foreground on the photograph I feel this is good as it creates a distance between the viewer and the bunker by having it in the middle of the image, it is also sitting towards the right third of the photograph and this works well for moving the eye while looking at the photograph. This I feel works well as it creates an almost physical distance but also we know there is a time distance between the onlooker and these structures. In the background we can see the remains of another bunker and I feel it is effective to have it in shot to show that this bunker was not the only one that the Germans built, but there were many in one place. The use of a black and white tones is effective as it creates a different feel compared to if the photograph was black and white. For me I personally like the way that Virilio has photographed this bunker as it is half in the sand, for me personally it is saying something about how these structures will disappear from sight, this one for example will eventually be covered by sand or sea, however they are still there and what happened and what is left isn’t so simple to just get rid of.
I would hope to bring some of what Paul Virilio has done with his work into my own with the ideas of having a still image and the black and whites contrast as I feel this is an effective feature when generating these types of photographs.
An archive is a place in which various forms of primary sources for information are stored. This can be in the form of photographs, letters, notes and various other sources. These records are stored as evidence that an event occurred often including an explanation of how these events happened and or why usually for personal or financial reasons. These records are generally accepted to be documents that have been naturally generated as part of various commercial, administrative or regal purposes. Archives make their distinction from libraries in the sense that the documents contained in an archive are typically unique and unpublished documents. As such, archives tend to act as a central location for the storage of various memories and cultures by giving an insight into the lives of those involved with the events surrounding the various documents stored. Photography within archives serves both a documentative and artistic purpose. Photo’s initial take for an artistic purpose can be used as documentation of the artists lives/ surroundings in a different time.
The use of archival imagery will allow me to improve my personal study as it helps give a better insight into the lives of those in the occupation and the time period as a whole. The archival imagery provides a primary source for research about the topic at hand. The use of archives is a resourceful method of research as archives primarily store documentation that isn’t recorded elsewhere, as such it provides fast access to information that would otherwise take much longer to find through secondary sources of information.
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.
Odette’s map, 1944
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
An archive is a collection of historical records or an actual place that they are located in. Archives contain documents which have been collected over a longitudinal period of time. These primary documents are then stored and used to showcase the function and or story of a particular person or organisation. Archives are used to allow us to gain a more in depth understanding of the historical factors at a particular moment in time, and act as a repertoire allowing us to reflect on the history of that specific place and time. Records stored within an archive is varied, from diaries, legal documents, financial documents to photographs and film. An archive can act as repositories of cultural memories of the past, as we are able to store reliable documents, which are memories of the past, which when we reflect on the documents will clearly show cultural memories. Although they are reliable, imagery is highly subjective which can lead to misinterpretation of the objects stored within an achive. Archival memory can be considered a social construct as they can show power of relationships in that society at that particular time in history.
Photography can perform as a double role within an archive as it visually showcases the person or organisation. Photographs can be used for both scientific purposes (images which are precise and detailed photographs of industrial events and processes. These photos can be used for monitoring industrial processes and allows us to view and analyse the change in the process. Within an archive this scientific purpose is useful as it allows us to see how a process or industrial event has changed from an archival image compared to a recent image of the same thing, allowing us to visually see a clear change) and artistic purposes (images which allows us to visually see the historic and cultural elements of the time and place at which the photograph was taken at. These photographs can almost tell stories which gives us insight into what life is like in that image and allows the imagination of the viewer to explore and interpret the photograph in a unique way.) which showcases the double role, of scientific and artistic purpose, which photographs have within a photo archive.
David Bate’s text explains how museums often use archives and collections of artefacts in order to display and present a particular cultural and or historical moment in time. Museums creates historical narratives of culture and can act as a repository of memories.
At the beginning of the text it talked about the ‘British Museum’ in London and how they only employed the first photographer, Roger Fenton, in 1854. Fenton captured images of the museum’s interior showcasing the artefacts, the reason behind this was to showcase what these artefacts looked like in the Victorian era, showing change and the historical values of the museum. The text says “The pictures themselves create an atmospheric space, with a kind of silence around the artefacts, a stillness of the historical museum.” This implies that the objects are said to have an “aura”, suggested by Walter Benjamin, which created a historical distance, outlining the importance of the historical factors in relation to the object. Fenton’s arhived images are still famous and are featured in museums to showcase the artefacts.
Another key artist mentioned within the text is Tracey Moffatt, who painted the series ‘Something More’ in 1989. In this series the paintings present a “fictionalised biographical account of a young Aboriginal woman’s desire to leave her rural life in the city.” In these images the background holds blurred figures in the background which are starring at the woman located in the foreground, the difference in appearance of the people helps to showcase the story and cultural factors within the paintings. Needless to say, the majority of the stories end in violence and or death. It is said that Moffatt’s early work within the series where based on personal memories, which makes her work a personal archive of personal memories presenting historical factors of her past.
Example of Moffatt’s Painting
Another key artist mentioned is Susan Hiller, who created hundreds of postcards of waves crashing onto the coasts around Britain, each postcards is presented differently through the experimentation of tinting, black and white and painting them. The postcards are then arranged into a grid format, showcasing an archival of “how a culture sees itself”. It is said that all the images work well together creating a lyrical display, as our eyes go round the frame following the waves crashing. Although the piece can be tranquil, the natural force of the sea begins to suggest a different viewpoint of force and power, which creates a link yo an emotional threat by a hostile person or idea. These methods and attitudes makes Hiller’s work an anthropologist or cultural archivist.
Susan Hiller’s photography
In a recent documentary on the BBC, Dr Gil Pasternak researched the photographic history of what family photographs say about Britain’s post-war social history. Within this they looked at issues concerning social class, gender and cultural background which affect the production, use and perceived meaning of a family portrait. They also looked at how the internet is changing the way photo archives are stored and used. Family Narratives where mainly shown through photo albums which showcased how precious some of the stories and memories where to the family. An important phrase told by Dr Gil read “These examples demonstrate how the development in photographic technology combined with local social history influenced the types of photographs they were able to capture, and therefore also the stories they were able to tell about themselves, their family and friends, their beliefs, interests, aspirations, and life in the UK more broadly.” They also said “In the era of smart technologies, family photographs no longer merely function as memories of the past, but they instead become active participants in the formation of our present experiences and in shaping the dynamics of family life.” This quote summaries the conclusions of the research and how modern day is shaping society and photography.
With the world constantly changing, and the future looking to be solely reliant on technology, it begins to suggest how archives will change and adapt to meet the requirements of the future. Many people share there images through social media, from facebook to instagram, which creates an online storage/archive of that person’s past, which allows others to reflect on their past and presents that person’s narrative in life. Images are much easier to store this way and are more cost effective, compared to printing them out, and accessible to everyone making this an ideal way for people to achieve their past. A limitation to using modern technology to create archives is the issues of loosing images, or if a social media sight was to shut down, due to this it can lead to an incomplete of completely lost photo archive, making material harder to find and less reliable.
To conclude, an archive is a key tool for contemporary photographers. They provide historical/cultural narratives which gives us insight in what life was like at that time and place. The documents stored within an archive varies but all still help to present a specific memory and provides useful insight. Archival material can enrich my personal study as the material will gives me insight into historical and cultural elements of the second world war, which enables me to think more carefully about what I am capturing and allows meaning to be presented within the images. Moreover, the narrative of the images tells the story of the war and the different aspects which will allow me to explore the story and the different aspects, which will provide a more well rounded project. In addition, archival material will be useful when I want to explore the memories of others in order to present their stories and will provide useful historical facts and stimulus’ to help develop my idea and knowledge of the war. In Jersey we have an archive called “Societe Jersiaise” which is a photographic archive containing roughly 80,000 images dating from the 1840s to present day. Due to the resources available to me should lead to an in-depth research into Jersey’s Second World War. In addition, a photographic achieve is a valuable source for contemporary photographers because of the idea “the best art understands a history to anticipate a future.” It also allows photographers to look at interpreting history in a new way to reveal a subjective narrative.
