“Champagne. Last surviving battlefield grave marker on the Western Front” (2021), a digital photograph by Michael St. Maur Sheil, is one of 30 photographs by the prominent photojournalist on view in the National WWI Museum and Memorial’s online exhibit, “Lands of Battle, Images of Peace.” (© copyright Michael St. Maur Sheil / National WWI Museum and Memorial)
The latest virtual exhibition offered by the National WWI Museum and Memorial offers a unique opportunity to revisit battlefields of World War I through the lens of the prominent photojournalist Michael St. Maur Sheil.
“Lands of Battle, Images of Peace” features 30 images, most from the Western Front, taken a century after peace was restored.
At first glance, viewers will be struck by the resilience of nature, which has reasserted its presence over the destruction of battle. But for those who look more closely, the remnants of battle emerge — poignant reminders of “the path that nations and their lands take from war to peace.”
The selected photos offer a variety of visual experiences. Graveyards, ubiquitous in such accounts, are included. But even more striking is the solitary, seemingly abandoned, grave of a fallen son, killed in April 1917 at Champagne, France, whose remains were rescued by his father two years later and buried beneath a wooden cross topped with his son’s helmet.
Other striking images of the battlefields of the war include a solitary soccer ball, that, as the story goes, Irish soldiers kicked ahead as they attacked German lines; barbed wire protruding from a snow-covered field; and skulls lining another field, having been disinterred over the years.
Critics have characterized Sheil’s work as the product of the “artist-photographer,” a title he resists, insisting that what he has done is “simply document what viewers are seeing through the camera lens.” As to the images, he explained in an article he wrote for “Western Front Photography” in August 2016, “The men of 1914-1918 largely saw the land torn apart and stripped of its covering mantle of grass and trees, its bones literally laid bare as they sought shelter within its protective skin. Today, living memory of those times has, sadly, all but disappeared, but the landscape, which was the setting for those tumultuous events, still reflects its violent past. Nature may have healed the tortured landscape of the battle, but the searching eye can frequently spot the place where concrete and steel push upwards from the soil like some strange fungus and the imprint of fighting trenches indicates where men fought and died.”
Sheil and his work are no strangers to Kansas City and the WWI Museum and Memorial. In 2017 an earlier version of the show, titled “Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace” after his 2016 book, was exhibited at the museum, which contributed photos from its collection to the exhibit. The show traveled to Pershing Park in Washington, D.C., where the National WWl Museum was credited with helping curate the exhibition.
On May 31, 2017, for Memorial Day, Sheil delivered an address at the Commemoration of the Centennial of World War I at the WWI Museum and Memorial, which is still available for viewing on YouTube.
Lora Vogt, the museum’s vice president of education and interpretation, stressed that the exhibition was a team effort, worked on by Nikki Dean, interpretation specialist; Stacie Petersen, collections registrar; and Sheil, who has contributed more than 400 of his photos to the museum.
It has been “a privilege watching, and being a part of, Mike’s work going back over a decade,” Vogt said, noting that the online exhibit advances the museum’s mission of reinforcing “the enduring impact of World War I with a modern perspective. Viewers will not leave the exhibition seeing the war in the same way.”
View “Lands of Battle, Images of Peace” at theworldwar.org/lands-battle-images-peace.
