vision verdun

Cyanotypes on paper, triptych  100x70cm, 2016

Vision Verdun is made up of ghost images made from photograms from Léon Poirier's film, Verdun, visions d'histoire produced in 1928 on the occasion of the anniversary of the armistice. These are not WWI documents, but footage from this film was released in postcard form as authentic battle scenes. They were then reproduced even in school books and historical works as documents, whereas they are reconstructions, and the film continues to be used when it is necessary to have illustrative images of the Battle of Verdun in the current documentaries.

Vision Verdun brings to photography as many pictorial accidents and manufacturing clues that testify to the manipulation of images. The layers that compose them are in the format of postcards which installed these emblematic images a posteriori in the memory of the event. The spectrality of the battlefield and of the human figures, almost imperceptible, bordering on abstraction, questions the persistence of an event in the collective memory by means of images, even though these turn out to be fictitious.