In honor of Remembrance Day, Mickael Therer quickly put together a project –’The War to End All Wars’ - rustling up twelve panographers and 23 panos of war memorials, battlegrounds and sites associated with war. One of my favorite parts is the little write up by each photographer about their pano, often detailing how Remembrance/Veteran’s Day is celebrated in their country.
Mickael Therer’s panorama of Sanctuary Wood, Hill 62, was taken on November 11, 2004, nearly a century after the Battle of Passendaele and the loss of over half a million men. It shows a small clearing surrounded by trees containing the remains of trenches. Another pano shows the remains of blasted trees, preserved since the end of the war, the little crosses with poppies are laid there by visitors as a token or remembrance. It’s hard to imagine the drama that took place here many decades ago. The caption reads, in part: “Many of the drowned were exhausted or wounded men who had slipped or fallen off the duckboards and were unable to escape the filthy, foul-smelling glutinous mud, sinking deeper to their deaths as they struggled.” How many men (most of whom we’re not even men, but barely out of boyhood) lived their last minutes on this soil, took their last breath, wishing for the security and comfort of their homes and mothers? These are the thoughts that come to mind while browsing through the images and, I suppose, that’s the whole point of this exercise: to spend a few moments imagining the horror.
Harold Walker’s panorama of the French World War I cemetery Nécropole Nationale La Targette in Neuville-Saint-Vaast, shows row upon row of white crosses marking the graves of 11,443 men and a mass grave of 3,882. These visual images are always far more effective in driving home the sheer scale of war in a way that statistics on the dead cannot. Another panorama shows the nearby German war cemetery La Maison Blanche, but here all the crosses are black. Edward Fink’s pano shows the now elderly war survivors, taken during the Veteran’s Ceremony in Minneapolis, at the Minneapolis, Minnesota VA Home, during an emotional rendition of God Bless America
As the idea only came to Therer two days before November 11th, there wasn’t time for everyone to participate that would have liked. He is mulling over the idea of organizing something larger around the war theme, although he doesn’t want to interfere with anything the World Wide Panorama series might contemplate covering, and marvels at WWP organizers’ post-production efficiency. “Don [Bain] and Landis [Bennett] have done a great job with the equinox project,” Therer writes. “I still get some feedback on my ‘Adčle's Birthday’ post in the March issue, which kicked me back into my VR passion, so I owe the WWP team for that. Bringing together a minor project like the ‘War to end all Wars’ also gave me a feel of what it was to bring together a collaborative project, I could never have coped with 150+ submissions, they could and in no time, so hat tip to WWP for that too.”
360 Days
The War to End All Wars is but a part of Therer’s VR blog – 360 Days – which he started in August 2004 as a pet project to bring VRs to the non-VR world. His “humble target” is to get panoramas out of the narrow circles of panoramists. Browsing through his blog, I’m struck by the amount of feedback he’s received in such a short time. “Although my log is mainly in English, strangely the main feedback came from the French speaking VR community; they dug me out and brought me to their lists very quickly and I have found unexpected friendships there,” he notes. Therer also gets a lot of feedback worldwide from bloggers, more so than English-speaking VR artists.
360 Days is written in both English and French and the site is simple and easy to navigate with a purposely unflashy interface. It uses textpattern and valid css and xhtml. Therer has a blog noise section where he occasionally adds VR-related articles; he describes it as “half blog, half VR picture gallery” and you’ll find an interesting compendium of places he and his family have visited, from Yorkshire and Britain’s seacoast to Barcelona and his native Belgium.
My personal favorite is ‘Apples and a Carrot’’, depicting his lovely young daughter Margot in the backyard apple orchard. Also noteworthy is the panographers of the future, taken at Photokina 2004, with 12 hotspots linking to other panographer websites.
The color, exposure and detail in the Land of Elves series is indeed absolutely fabulous, as a couple of viewers remarked. And the background sound in this and some of his other panos really intensifies the sense of being there.
Therer first became interested in photography at 11, when his mother lent him an SLR. “I was frustrated at framing anything I could see”, he remembers. “Once developed the film only showed an ordered row of pics of everything around me … first pictures, first pano.” Today, he manages a graphics studio for a communications agency and uses 360 Days as his playground.
We look forward to more interesting panoramas from Mickael Therer as he “plays” with 360 Days!
