Shot at Dawn

On 23 May Ivorypress presented the exhibition Shot at Dawn by British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews (London, 1982) as part of the festival Off PhotoEspaña.

Shot at Dawn focuses on the sites at which soldiers from the British, French and Belgian armies were executed for cowardice and desertion during the First World War. The two-year project involved in-depth primary research to create images of twenty-three locations at which the soldiers were shot or held in the period leading up to their execution. All are seasonally accurate and were taken as close as possible to the precise time of day at which the executions occurred.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Ivorypress that provides a visual record of the project as well as a critical analysis of the work by writer Geoff Dyer and contextual essays about the crimes of cowardice and desertion and the psychological trauma caused by military service by historians Hew Strachan and Helen McCartney.

Images: © Marjorie Blanchet. Courtesy Ivorypress