PHOTŒIL
I am born in the heart of Flanders Fields and the Great War got into my system. As a young boy, when going to school, I walked along three war memorials, day after day, and in the evening, life slowed down for a while when the Last Post was blown as a never ending remembrance. In my family, horrific stories were told about the gas, shells, trenches, mutilation and dead.
I had to make that book just to get even with that damn war…
I decided to follow the 'Red Line': from Nieuwpoort to the Swiss border, the Western Front, a 750 kilometers long journey, that took me 5 years to photograph. In search for what remains, pushed by Kipling's famous epitaph: "If any Question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied".
My friend and journalist Johan Van Cauwenberge selected a vast collection of mind-blowing texts written by the men, artists, who fought that terrible war and lost their young and promising lives, sacrificed in an absurd slaughtering. These impressive texts and poems are interwoven with my pictures in a book meant as a tribute to whom who fell fighting oppression.
NO MORE WAR!
OPUS 14-18
Kunstenaars aan het front van WO I
