Shooting Sites of Execution
In 2006, Britain's Ministry of Defense officially pardoned 306 soldiers it had executed for cowardice or desertion during World War I. Photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews has embarked on her own photographic tribute to them.
In 2006, Britain’s Ministry of Defense officially pardoned 306 soldiers it had executed for cowardice or desertion during World War I. Many of them were underage, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and hadn’t been given a fair trial. Among them, 16-year-old Herbert Burden had lied about his age so he could join the army; after he fled a massacre 10 months later, he was shot by firing squad. Burden later came to represent these ill-fated young men: his likeness was used in a monument commemorating them, titled “Shot at Dawn.” Photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews borrowed that name when she embarked on her own photographic tribute, commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art as part of 14–18 NOW and currently on view at Stills center for photography in Scotland.
For the series, the photographer visited 23 execution sites around the same time and season as when the soldiers died there. These landscapes may now be quiet and even bucolic, but Mathews’s photographs ensure that their past horrors are not forgotten. As Geoff Dyer, who introduced the accompanying monograph by Ivorypress, wrote in Harper’s, “When no grave or memorial is in view, one still understands — one feels — that this is more than just a conventionally pleasing landscape, even if the particulars of what has happened remain unknown. History has taken root here.”
Shot at Dawn, Chloe Dewe Mathews is on view at Stills (23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, Scotland) through January 25, 2015.
