FRANCE: D-Day: Ghosts in a Landscape

65 years on and the bloodstains of D-Day are still visible.

The world has never seen, nor will it ever again, another day like June 6, 1944 and with each passing year, those who bore witness to the chaos of D-Day diminish in numbers, and with them their stories. Soon, the only living evidence will be the scars on the landscape.

These photographs are another means to keep these memories alive, to capture places where time has stood still: a church with bloodstained...
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65 years on and the bloodstains of D-Day are still visible.

The world has never seen, nor will it ever again, another day like June 6, 1944 and with each passing year, those who bore witness to the chaos of D-Day diminish in numbers, and with them their stories. Soon, the only living evidence will be the scars on the landscape.

These photographs are another means to keep these memories alive, to capture places where time has stood still: a church with bloodstained pews, a soldier's name carved into a bunker wall, a German officer's rusted cot, a faded trench-line, a fortification withered by decades of rising tides.

Much has changed along the 60km, of Normandy coastline, yet many parts still bear the open wounds of a bloody-battle fought in freeing a continent from the vice-grip of a genocidal ideology, but these scars will not remain forever.

Along sections of Omaha Beach, where the heaviest fighting took place and German fortifications were many, nearly all evidence of what happened has been completely enveloped by the earth, as if to conceal a most terrible crime. German bunkers on Juno Beach, where Canadians suffered the heaviest allied losses next to Omaha, are slowly sinking into the sand.

WWII is a time where the best and worst of humanity collided, yet it is a period in history many recall with conflicting viewpoints, some as a romantic era with notions of courage, duty and sacrifice; others remembering it as mankind's darkest hour.
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