This coming Sunday,
August 19, will mark the 70th anniversary of the Dieppe raid. Over 6,000 men
participated in Operation Jubilee, 5,000 of whom where Canadian
soldiers.
The operation
was an attempt by allied forces to test German defenses in the small port of
Dieppe and on the surrounding beaches. The military operation was a major human
and military catastrophe. More than 900 Canadian soldiers died that morning on
the beaches and 1,946 men were taken prisoner. Hundreds of others were wounded.
Not to be
confused with D-Day landing at Normandy, the Dieppe raid is profoundly
imprinted in the Canadian and Québécois collective memory.
"The
Dieppe raid profoundly marked Canada's collective memory. Gratuitous sacrifice
or Machiavellian plan for some, prelude to the successful landing at Normandy
in 1944 for others, rarely has a battle given rise to such controversy. Dieppe
remains forever the stage of modern tragedy."
Béatrice
Richard
Autopsy of a tragedy
What is
striking is how little is known about this event outside the Upper-Normandy
region, even by the French. However, in the collective memory of the Québécois,
the Dieppe raid is the source of profound bitterness and at the origin of a
myth that the commanding British and English Canadian Officers sacrificed the
lives of French Canadians (Québécois) to German fire as cannon fodder. The
facts are far more nuanced and complex, but no less tragic.
In July of
2002, after months of preparation and sixty years after the raid, I went to
Dieppe to create Jubilee, an installation comprising 913
portraits of men laid in the pebbles on the beach. Mounted on cardboard, the
photographs stood in place for a day, as small steles. The men depicted were,
for the most part, soldiers, but also artists, colleagues, and young men; they
were contemporary stand-ins for those who disappeared at Dieppe on the morning
of August 19, 1942.
In creating Jubilee, I wanted to stir up a reminder of
this tragic event of the Second World War. My wish was to create a work in
situ, right at the very scene of the tragedy, an ephemeral monument where
hundreds of silent men's faces would look back at us, a photographic cemetery.
The photographs themselves then disappeared into the sea, carried off by the rising tide by the rising tide.
The day following
the installation on the beach, I went to Varengeville-sur-mer (10km from Dieppe)
and created a second installation in front of the small church there. This
installation would last all summer.
From an elevated
vantage point, one photograph was made, situating all of the individual faces
in the landscape. Then other photographs were taken, showing details of the
installation. This series of installation views became the Jubilee project.
During the
following year, I returned to Dieppe in order to capture the landscape of this
part of Upper-Normandy and the remains of the Atlantic Wall along the cliffs. This
second series came to be known as Caux.
Then came 913,
a 30-minute documentary film about the creation of the installation through to
its destruction, and providing some historical perspectives on the Dieppe raid.
Finally, I
published Dieppe, Installations and landscapes with Éditions les 400 coups in 2006.
In this book, essays by Béatrice Richard, André-Louis Paré, and Didier Mouchel
accompany my photographs.
The film is now
being shown at Encontros Abiertos à Buenos Aires (Argentina), at
Centro Cultural Recoleta , August 3 to 26 2012.
I'm disappointed
that the town of Dieppe did not choose to show the exhibition or screen the
film of this event.
The Jubilee
project with the 913 film will be exhibited this fall at Photovisa in Krasnodar, Russia. For this
occasion, I chose to create a new work from the many original portraits. Still in the
making as a finished piece, I will be posting the work on this blog shortly.
* Thank you to Linda Eerme for corrections and keaping my English understantable.
* Thank you to Linda Eerme for corrections and keaping my English understantable.
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