Major Project

Came back from rooting around old boxes and files in my gran’s house at the weekend and turned up some interesting nuggets of information. I found a commemorative album for the 8th Army, printed in 1944 that seems to parallel the China book given to my Japanese grandad. Also found out more about my grandfather’s time in North Africa and just writing to a surviving member of his group who currently lives in Australia.

With the approach to the project, I’m thinking of keeping the scrapbook idea, using the materials I already have and place them alongside a series of parallel landscape images that begin in my grandads’ rural villages and gradually end up in their desert postings. Having a few wacky ideas, but at the moment nothing seems to suite this project better than a more formal landscape approach. Also I’m wondering if the two parallel pictures visually connect in some way, it might make it more interesting…

Major Project – new idea!

After the conflict photography presentation, I thought it would be interesting to discover more about my grandfather’s experiences in the war and create a piece of work for the main project over the summer. I’m thinking it would take the shape of a photographic journey, retracing his steps and revisiting the locations where he served and fought, which were mostly in the deserts of Inner Mongolia. I’m not sure if it will be possible, but it would combine well with a project on my English grandfather’s war experiences, a Devonshire man who also came from a simple rural farming community and ended up fighting in a distant desert in North Africa. I’m just not sure if I’ve got the funds to do both this year…

This project will be fascinating for me personally, but I’ll try to think hard about an approach to the project so it doesn’t turn out to be a very private and self-absorbed piece of work. Hopefully I can come up with something that has a bit more to say than the usual retracing of family histories that you often see.

In the meantime I’m just trying to collect as much information as possible. On the Japanese side, I’m waiting on the Japanese military archives for the battalion field reports and the reason my grandfather left the war early and I should find out more about my English granddad from my gran who I’m seeing this weekend.