On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Germany and the Allied Forces officially ended World War I with the signing of an armistice in a train car in France. One hundred years later, museums and historical societies around the world are marking the centennial of the war’s end, showcasing stories, sounds, and images meant to capture both the extraordinary scale of war and the intimacy of daily life during the conflict. One such exhibit is No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War, commissioned by West Yorkshire, England’s Impressions Gallery.
Images taken by women like Olive Edis, the first woman officially sent to war as a photographer, and nurse Florence Farmborough, who used her camera to document the gruesome realities of fighting even when the United Kingdom’s government tried to downplay the horrors of war, sit next to new art by Dawn Cole, whose mixed-media pieces are made from the wartime diaries of her great-aunt, and Chloe Dewe Mathews, whose photographs consider the fate of soldiers executed for desertion. The exhibition will go on tour in 2019, bringing the viewpoints of often-ignored figures in World War I history to galleries around the world.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September/October 2018 issue of Pacific Standard. Subscribe now to support independent journalism in the public interest.
