Shot at Dawn: Late photography and the anti-war memorial

Abstract

The military executions of World War One are the subject of Chloe Dewe Mathews’s 2014 photographic series Shot at Dawn. These events—in which hundreds of soldiers were court-martialled and executed for cowardice and desertion—remain controversial, without consensus or established collective narrative. This article charts historic negotiations with the subject but also considers more recent efforts to integrate these proceedings within memorial practice. World War One remembrance activities, whilst diverse, have often emphasised sacrifice, heroism and community. Correspondingly, participation and engagement were core values in the major British World War One centenary arts project, titled 14-18 NOW, from which Shot at Dawn was commissioned. Chloe Dewe Mathews’s contribution to the programme, however, presents a photographic aesthetic of resistance to the principles of inclusivity and remembrance elsewhere embraced by the project. As such, the work challenges the consensual politics of commemoration and—through the practices of late photography, land art and performance pilgrimage—substitutes trauma and forgetfulness for reconciliation and memory.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] Historians have done important work in recent years on the ‘regional’ picture of wartime executions; see Robert King, Shot at Dawn: The fifteen Welshmen executed by the British Army in the First World War (Stroud: The History Press, 2014) and Stephen Walker, Forgotten Soldiers: The Irishmen Shot at Dawn (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2007).

[2] Several of Dewe Mathews’s other works engage with issues of pilgrimage and dislocation. Her series Sunday Service, exhibited in 2014, depicted the retooling of industrial spaces for religious services by African Christians in South London. Her earlier Hasidic Holiday focussed on British Orthodox Jews holidaying in Aberystwyth while her more recent Thames Log reflected on London’s great river, documenting encounters and events that often turned out to be religious or ritualistic in nature.

[3] The term ‘overlay’ is discussed in Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979 (London: Southbank Centre, 2013), 68. It is the title of Lucy Lippard’s 1983 book about the relationship between contemporary art and prehistory, taken by Lippard from Alfred Watkins’s 1925 The Old Straight Track, an autoethnographic study of ley lines across Southern England and inspiration for much of Richard Long’s work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynsey McCulloch

Lynsey McCulloch is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and an Associate Member of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. She holds BA (Hons) and MA degrees in literary studies and a PhD in ‘Animated Statuary in Early Modern Drama’. Her first full-length book, Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance (edited with Sarah Annes Brown and Robert I. Lublin), was published in May 2013 by Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance and has also published on the visual arts and spatial humanities. Her current research interests include memorial practices, outdoor learning and the walking arts.

Rob Tovey is a Lecturer in Environmental Graphic Design at Loughborough University—principally working across information design and photography. He holds a BA (Hons) in Visual Communication, an MA in Graphic Design and a PhD investigating photo-composites in the context of information design, mapping and the digital image. His research interests include experimental graphic visualisations and communication design within the context of space, place-making and memory. His research has been published in books including The Edge of Our Thinking (2012), The Reflexive Photographer (2015) and Post-Screen: Intermittence and Interference (2016), and in journals such as Visual Communication (Sage). He has given papers at numerous conferences and is involved in several funded research projects. He has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards including The Searle Prize, Fresh Awards, D&AD, Digital Innovation Awards and the George Jackson Prize.

Rob Tovey

Lynsey McCulloch is an Assistant Professor of English Literature and an Associate Member of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. She holds BA (Hons) and MA degrees in literary studies and a PhD in ‘Animated Statuary in Early Modern Drama’. Her first full-length book, Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance (edited with Sarah Annes Brown and Robert I. Lublin), was published in May 2013 by Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance and has also published on the visual arts and spatial humanities. Her current research interests include memorial practices, outdoor learning and the walking arts.

Rob Tovey is a Lecturer in Environmental Graphic Design at Loughborough University—principally working across information design and photography. He holds a BA (Hons) in Visual Communication, an MA in Graphic Design and a PhD investigating photo-composites in the context of information design, mapping and the digital image. His research interests include experimental graphic visualisations and communication design within the context of space, place-making and memory. His research has been published in books including The Edge of Our Thinking (2012), The Reflexive Photographer (2015) and Post-Screen: Intermittence and Interference (2016), and in journals such as Visual Communication (Sage). He has given papers at numerous conferences and is involved in several funded research projects. He has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards including The Searle Prize, Fresh Awards, D&AD, Digital Innovation Awards and the George Jackson Prize.