Ann Lovett

Se Souvenir, 2005

Se Souvenir documents the memorials and beaches commemorating the D-Day invasion during the World War II in Normandy, France. It’s also about my ex-father-in-law, whom I never met, and who was wounded in the second wave of the invasion. The photographs of Max present a smiling uniformed soldier who looks healthy and whole. Little in these pictures speaks of the horrors of war, what he must have seen, or the fear he must have felt. For my generation, these ‘memories’ are constructed from the stories our fathers told us, or more often from the imagery of Hollywood films, images of courage and heroism, and perhaps for Americans the last righteous war. For the residents of Normandy that history happened in their towns and in their backyards, and though those who experienced it are dwindling in number, the memorials and the memories of heroic liberators are enmeshed in everyday life. Although there is little evidence of the damage of war in Max’s photographs or in the sparkling sands of Utah Beach, it is evident in the bruised landscape, still scarred in a few places by bomb craters, remnants of bunkers, and of course cemeteries, where French, American, British, and German soldiers are all buried. In Se Souvenir, the images both resonate and collide with each other, in some page spreads flowing together at the horizon line, while in others there is a discordant juxtaposition of space and form. There’s both continuity and tension between beauty and damage, between past and present, and between what appears to be documented and what we think we know. Se souvenir translates from French as to remember.

 
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