With his Normandy project, Spanish photographer Eduardo Nave shows us how certain events articulate new meanings in the landscape, particularly those that took place on D-Day on the French coast. The project covers the five D-Day beaches – codenamed at the time Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword – in a series where passers-by, bathers and sunsets coexist with the metal structures that still stand as ancient monuments to our wartime past.
On June 6th 1944, thousands of men fought on five beaches once codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. A year later, the war in Europe ended. The project covers these beaches in a series in which passers-by, bathers, and sunsets coexist with the metallic structures that remain, like ancient monuments of our wartime past, which help us understand how certain events articulate new meanings in the landscape.
This project was carried out at different times: between 2003 and 2005, the first series was made: Les rivages du débarquement and Mulberry Harbour. In 2019, the year in which the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings was commemorated, Eduardo returned to the beaches for a different kind of immersion, this time with the help of new technologies, with which he captured elements, environments and remains on the coast that escaped his gaze on the first trips. In this way, we can contemplate from the heights the remains of the docks and beaches with the perspective the pilots had. At the same time, it allows us to experience from the water what the soldiers must have felt as they made their way to the beach.
The Normandy landings marked the beginning of the end of World War II, an important event engraved in the memory of the 20th century. But what happens when a place becomes part of history, and can the landscape retain its memory?
The space portrayed by the photographer contains a crack linked to our past. Latent like the vestige of a wound, it attracts the attention of both the photographer and the spectator because intuiting the ruins of a battle from the present also brings us face to face with its ghosts.
All this is a reflection on the weight and the trace of the history that has been trapped in the light of those beaches, where thousands of men stumbled upon an inferno of mines and gunfire that generated thousands of dead who have remained linked to the constant crashing of the waves. When you look closely at those beaches through a camera, you perceive a tremor that transcends the visual because photography, using the poetics of the contemplation of the place, makes us participants in our history.
Isabel Hernández
