Printed: Grafiche dell’arte, 2019
Language: Italian, English

​Photography: Giancarlo Barzagli
Text: Wu Ming 2
Graphic design: Roberta Donatini
Curated by: Claudia Paladini
Cartography: Massimo Cingotti
Archive Images: Fototeca CIDRA Imola

Grüne Linie is a photographic research on the memory of the events in which a small valley in the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines played a crucial role, when it became part of the war front during World War II.
The project traces a line that connects History to the voices of those who fought and lived in those mountains, following the clues that were left on the region, somewhere in between childhood memories and memories of the conflict.
“Grüne Linie” was the name that the German Army had given to the Gothic Line: a strip of defences and fortifications, which ran along the Apennines, cutting Italy in two, from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic coast. A line that wound through woods and villages, filled with stories of courage and fear, revenge and resistance.
Those stories left an indelible signs in the landscape and in the memory of the few remaining witnesses.

In July 1994, the 36th Brigade, the Garibaldi Bianconcini partisans, comprised of roughly 400 fighters, moved into the Rovigo River Valley in the Appenines between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, bunking down in the farmhouses scattered across the mountains. Although this area was at the centre of German manoeuvres fortifying the Gothic Line, the Command maintained that its impervious terrain would provide a safe place for its partisans and for organising sabotage operations.

Publisher:  the Eriskay Connection, 2021
Language: English, Dutch

​Photography: Peter Dekens
Design: Rob van Hoesel
Lythography: Rob van Hoesel

Peter Dekens’ earliest memory of the First World War dates back to 1979, aged 12. One of his cousins found an old, unexploded bombshell and tried to dismantle it. The explosive went off and he succumbed to his injuries later that same evening.
Driving along the former front line in Ypres (Belgium) now it’s nearly impossible to imagine that one of the most horrific wars of all time was waged here one hundred years ago.

The traces of the Great War have been almost completely erased from the landscape, over the course of decades, hundreds of bunkers were removed. To this very day, human remains and projectiles are still found every time someone sticks a spade into the soil. Somewhere beneath the sod, tens of thousands of missing soldiers are presumed to lie undiscovered, along with hundreds of thousands of unexploded shells.
An estimated thirty per cent of the 1.5 billion bombshells fired during the First World War never went off. Some of the people who live in the area have developed a sixth sense for this hidden history: where tens of thousands of tourists and travellers pass by unknowing, the locals know that the slightest raise or dip in the road could be an indication that war remnants still lie uneasy beneath the earth.

For centuries, Europe was a divided continent with countless wars and infinite redefinitions of shared borders. It briefly seemed as though the First World War would be the very last, the “war to end all wars”. Ultimately, however, those years planted the first seeds of the Second World War. Long-lasting peace, prosperity and progress did not come to Europe until after 1945. The establishment of the European Community was envisioned as an affirmation of permanent peace in Europe. With the recent situation surrounding Brexit and the surge in nationalist, anti-European movements in various European countries, it seems that the awareness of the importance of unity stands on shaky ground again. The traces of a history of war seem to be fading rapidly from memory.

Publisher: Polygon, 2018
Language: English, French and German

​Photography: Donald Weber
Text: Larry Frolick, Kevin Robbie and Donald Weber
Design: Teun van der Heijden, Heijdens Karwei
Separations: Sebastiaan Hanekroot, Colour & Books

In this visionary collection of images, texts, and scientific data, photographer Donald Weber and his colleagues investigate the beaches of D-Day using the latest techniques of forensic analysis. What they find is something far larger than its microscopic constituents: War isn’t just a defining feature of our collective experience, but a quantum event, as well.
The war-relics presented here offer an immersive narrative on the theme of social memory. The assembled D-Day artifacts include WWII spy-craft and old Hollywood movies, dioramas and drone-mounted cameras, private post-war memoirs and wistful seaside photographs. They reveal our civilization’s longing for a final victory over death.
War Sand seeks a great truth: What is history? And what does it mean to us, its creators and survivors?

Composed by tre volumes
Memory Trace
Independence | Nakba
Desert Bloom

Publisher: Steidl
Language: English / Arabic / Hebrew

Photography: Fazal Sheikh
Text: Fazal Sheikh
Book Design: Fazal Sheikh with Duncan White/Steidl Design

The Erasure Trilogy explores the anguish caused by the loss of memory—by forgetting, amnesia or suppression—and the resulting human desire to preserve memory, all seen through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Memory Trace, the first book in the trilogy, depicts the ruins caused by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948: portraits of those traumatized by violence, devastated landscapes and fragments of buildings. This visual poem suggests the irreparable loss of a lingering past that augurs a painful and diffi cult future. Tracing the ironic consequences of David Ben-Gurion’s dream of settling the Negev and making the “desert bloom,” the aerial photographs in Sheikh’s Desert Bloom reveal the myriad actions that have displaced and erased the Bedouins who have lived in the desert for generations. Here we see the extreme transformation of the landscape through erosion, mining, military training camps, the demolition of villages and afforestation. Through Sheikh’s lens the desert becomes both an archive of violence and a record of human attempts to erase it.

Independence | Nakba consists of sixty-six diptychs — one for each year since 1948 — pairing people from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of gradually increasing age. The double portraits query the relations between Israelis and Palestinians before the founding of the Israeli State (each image depicts either someone who lived in Palestine before the founding of the Israeli State, or someone whose ancestors did).

Desert Bloom Notes, the essential companion reader to Desert Bloom, explores the historical and contemporary clues along the shifting surface of the desert, and what lies hidden, sealed within Sheikh’s aerial landscapes of the Negev.

Publisher: Ivorypress, 2014
Language: English

​Photography: Chloe Dewe Mathews
Text: Geoff Dyer, Sir Hew Strachan and Dr. Helen McCartney

This book is published in association with the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford.

Produced over the eighteen month period leading up to the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Shot at Dawn is a new body of work by the British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews that focuses on the sites at which British, French and Belgian troops were executed for cowardice and desertion between 1914 and 1918. The project comprises images of the locations at which individuals were shot or held in the period leading up to their executions and all were taken as close to the exact time of execution as possible and at approximately the same time of year.

The book provides a complete visual record of Shot at Dawn. It also contains a critical analysis of the work by the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer and expert contextual essays on cowardice, desertion and psychological trauma brought on by military service by the acclaimed historians Sir Hew Strachan and Dr Helen McCartney.

Publisher: Silvana Editoriale, 2014
Language: English, Italian

​Photography: Luca Campigotto
Text: Lyle Rexer, Mario Isnenghi, Marco Meneguzzo,
Gustavo Pietropolli Charmet, L. Campigotto

In Theaters of War, Italian photographer Luca Campigotto (born 1962) presents research on World War I, on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. Campigotto’s pictures reveal not only the physical traces preserved by nature, but also the lingering emotional effects and trauma of the war.

Printed: GOST, 2015
Language: English

​Photography: Lisa Barnard
Essays: Julian Stallabras and Eugénie Shinkle

Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden, is a study into the ‘unholy alliance’ between the military, the entertainment industry and technology, and their coalescence around modern-day warfare. As Fredric Jameson famously observed in 1991 “the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.”

Barnard’s publication explores the complex relationship between these apparently divergent arenas and how the screen is pivotal to the emergence and ongoing development in the relationship between war, media and industry as they relate to the virtual and the real.

Shifting from screen to landscape and incorporating imagery from disparate yet indelibly connected areas: from Las Vegas to Pakistan, Waziristan to Hollywood (via Washington), this new work questions photojournalism’s ‘truth claims’ and the indecipherable, all-consuming nature of the industrial-military complex.

The ‘machines in the garden’ denote the dialectical tension between the American pastoral ideal and machine technology. The ‘hyenas of the battlefield’ are the technological-driven corporations that keep the US soldiers ‘in the loop’, but off the ground.

This is the goal of the US administration: a model of warfare where no more American soldiers die on the battlefield.

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, 2014
Language: English

​Photography: Ashley Gilbertson
Text: Ashley Gilbertson, Philip Gourevitch

For more than a decade, the United States has been fighting wars so far from the public eye as to risk being forgotten, the struggles and sacrifices of its volunteer soldiers almost ignored. Photographer and writer Ashley Gilbertson has been working to prevent that. His dramatic photographs of the Iraq war for the New York Times and his book Whiskey Tango Foxtrot took readers into the mayhem of Baghdad, Ramadi, Samarra, and Fallujah.

But with Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson reminds us that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have also reached deep into homes far from the noise of battle, down quiet streets and country roads-the homes of family and friends who bear their grief out of view.

The book’s wide-format black-and-white images depict the bedrooms of forty fallen soldiers-the equivalent of a single platoon-from the United States, Canada, and several European nations. Left intact by families of the deceased, the bedrooms are a heartbreaking reminder of lives cut short: we see high school diplomas and pictures from prom, sports medals and souvenirs, and markers of the idealism that carried them to war, like images of the Twin Towers and Osama Bin Laden. A moving essay by Gilbertson describes his encounters with the families who preserve these private memorials to their loved ones and shares what he has learned from them about war and loss

Publisher:  Danilo Montanari Editore
Language: English – Italian

Photography: Andrea Botto
Concept and Design: Andrea Botto
Hand-bound: Andrea Botto and Legatoria Universo

On June 19, 1945, photographer Andrea Botto’s grandfather, Primo Benedetti, was released from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp and began making his way back home to Tuscany.

This book, which won third place for the 2012 Kassel Fotobookfestival Dummy Award, retraces that journey via online image searches for the names of cities he passed through and dates of his travel (such as “Hanover, 1945”). A sprawling set of black-and-white images are scattered across the page spreads: bombs exploding, bodies in uniform, Nazi weddings, and anachronistic tattooed punks. Small documents scanned from Benedetti’s passport, transfer papers, and letters home are printed on different types of paper and bound into the journal-format book. Lesley Martin calls it “a memory palace astutely built from the flotsam and jetsam of the Internet image archive.”

Prizes:
Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014, finalist
Les Rencotres d’Arles Author’s Book Award 2014, finalist
Premio Ponchielli 2014 “Best book of the year”
FotoBookFestival Kassel Dummy Award 2012, Third Prize

Publisher: STEIDL, 2012
Language: English

​Photography: Paola De Pietri
Text: Roberta Valtorta, Mario Rigoni Stern

Paola De Pietri first learnt of World War I at school and from family members who recounted historical facts through personal experiences – experiences that are in danger of being forgotten. In To Face De Pietri preserves these memories in a series of photographs of the alps between Italy and Austria, a landscape that still bears the scars of trench warfare from nearly a century ago. De Pietri’s subtle, unassuming images show a landscape once damaged by man is now being reclaimed by nature.