My elderly mother, well into her 80s, has been contributing to the ‘at the going down of the sun’ exhibition, currently on display at Bristol cathedral. A few days ago I had the opportunity to visit the exhibition with my mother.
The exhibition commemorates those who have lost their lives over the last 104 years, thereby including the First World War. As I was born in the early 1960s I have no direct connection with the world wars, or any other conflict for that matter.
And yet as the years tick by this is becoming increasingly important.
The exhibition itself is a collection of photographs taken at night in a number of graveyards. I do like the photographs, though they’re not the kind I’d want to hang on my living room wall (I don’t mean that in an unkind way). They have a certain sombre and respectful quality to them, as well as being of high technical quality. The photographs capture the coldness and harshness of a gravestone and combine this with individuality.
Taking photographs at night, in dark graveyards, must be very challenging from a photographic point of view and yet this has been accomplished well. In one of the photographs there are some white and yellow daisies, with some a little blurred through a breeze wafting passed. I like this, it brings that extra bit of reality and immediacy to the image.
In order to bring the exhibition to life, there are some recordings of some folk (accessed through a QR code), such as my mother and her sister, who are talking about their childhood memories of the Second World War. My mother recounts moving from London to Weston-super-Mare in the early days of the war and where she then lived in a hostel with her younger sister. Meanwhile her father was gravely ill in a London hospital.
Her mother used to pay regular visits to Weston to see her girls. She used to travel on a “troop train” as so few people had cars in those days (and I guess even if you had a car, you couldn’t necessarily obtain any petrol). On one visit, my mother noticed her mother was wearing black; a sign of being in mourning. At that point she knew her father must have passed away but it didn’t seem right to ask about it and her own mother (for some reason) didn’t want to share the news. So my mother kept it to herself, not wanting to upset her younger sister, my aunt.
I have heard my mother talk about this many times. It is such an important but incredibly sad and heart wrenching experience for her. There she was, in a hostel far away from her mother bearing such grieve and seemingly unable to share it with anyone; it must have been an almost unbearable burden for such a young girl. It was on her mother’s next visit, some three weeks later, that her own mother shared the news about her father dying in hospital. She just didn’t feel able to do so any earlier.
Some further information by Marko Dutka (the photographer) can be accessed here . Also the Bristol Cathedral website currently has information about the exhibition here. The exhibition runs in Bristol Cathedral until 19 november 2018.
