The Shortlist of the Alfred Fried Photography Award 2017
Fields of Battle: 1914-1918
Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace 1914-18. One hundred years ago a veteran of WWI wrote "I saw that bare country before me...the miles and miles of torn earth, the barbed wire, the litter, the dead trees. But the country would come back to life, the grass would grow again, the wild flowers return, and trees where now there were only splintered skeleton stumps … below the singing larks, beside the serenely flowing rivers.” Today time and nature have healed the scars of war and what were once fields of battle, full of death and horror, are now landscapes of great beauty and tranquillity, and these photographs are a celebration of that soldier's vision of the peace that would follow the war. They cover all the theatres of WW1.
Photos by Michael St Maur Sheil
Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace 1914-18. One hundred years ago a veteran of WWI wrote "I saw that bare country before me...the miles and miles of torn earth, the barbed wire, the litter, the dead trees. But the country would come back to life, the grass would grow again, the wild flowers return, and trees where now there were only splintered skeleton stumps … below the singing larks, beside the serenely flowing rivers.” Today time and nature have healed the scars of war and what were once fields of battle, full of death and horror, are now landscapes of great beauty and tranquillity, and these photographs are a celebration of that soldier's vision of the peace that would follow the war. They cover all the theatres of WW1.
Photos by Michael St Maur Sheil