Output details

Dark formations

The Imperial War Museum’s archive contains thousands of images, 35mm films, and audio recordings. But digitisation and improved access do not always translate into expanded understandings of such materials. This project demonstrated how artists and scholars can collaborate on creative and critical interpretations of documentary materials to make new connections, leading to new insights for curators and museum audiences through new approaches to display and presentation. In particular, images on their own do not immediately reveal the complexity of events and the contexts from which they originate. The formal beauty of an aerial shot taken from on board a bomber aircraft does not necessarily afford insight into the experience of the crews that flew the plane, or of those on the ground. Similarly, attempts to memorialise WWII campaigns such as Bomber Command are often criticised as lacking in ‘recognition of moral complexity’. Critical artistic interpretation of historical documents can produce more layered understandings of their relationship to human history.

Over four years (2009-2013), David Chandler (Prof of Photography, Plymouth) Roger Tolson (Head of Art, IWM) and I met extensively to consider new interpretative approaches to the extensive image collection in the IWM archives concerning the allied bombing campaigns over Germany in the final years of WWII. Chandler and Tolson were particularly interested in the possibility of artistic framings of these images in order to make the human significance of the impact of war clearer in gallery settings. The resulting work, Dark Formations, consists of a 12-minute film comprising photo stills, with music, sound and archive audio material, for live performance, screening or exhibition usage, in which the sound element seeks to encapsulate the tension between visceral horror on the ground, the abstract beauty of the documentary shots made by the planes overhead, and the experience of the bomber crews.