When the War is Over

There is, of course, more to the process of the construction of war graves than stone; the administrative and design process behind each grave is a complex, sprawling task.
The book presents images of ledgers and memorial walls to tell this part of the story. In seeing them, one cannot help but notice again the scale of death; of each person’s story in the context of such mass destruction.

A booklet, positioned the centre of the book, tells us the story of Jimmy (JH Brown), a soldier whose name was inscribed on a wall the booklet underlines.
This, Alexander says, “is designed to act as a bridge between the paper-based record of the dead and the stone monument” and is “a way of moving from the mass to the individual”.
This tension between the commemoration of the individual and the sheer scale of death was a controversial one in the time of Kenyon.

“We were interested in this tension,” Alexander says. “It exists between the aim to make something monumental that will commemorate everyone individually, by treating everyone the same.”
Perhaps the one place we can understand the anguish of the families of lost ones is in the portrayal of the messages that they – despite Kenyon’s reluctance – were allowed to inscribe on graves.

Some of these are truly touching and individual, but many, Alexander says: “Repeat very similar phrases, to draw attention to the commonality in the attempt to express grief and loss.”
In this vain, “the rhythm of the book is designed to move the viewer constantly between the mass and the individual.”
At its end, the book shows aerial views of war graves stitched together from satellite images. These illustrate the sheer impact these monuments have on the landscape.

“It seemed to me to be one of the only ways to be able to represent their scale with a visual language that avoided the sentimental and overly familiar images of these cemeteries shot from the ground,” Alexander says.
But Alexander also has another association in mind, that of “the aerial view with aerial surveillance and aerial bombing.”

“This is meant to question the purpose and effectiveness of memorials to the dead,” he says.
This point is amplified once one notices some of the locations for the images. Egypt, Syria, and Libya are countries where recent conflicts we are still watching unfold, often from airborne cameras.
So at the end of When the War is Over, our attention is drawn to the ongoing nature of conflict. Kenyon’s words remain laudable, but are they sustainable?
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