Matthew Arnold

Topography Is Fate—North African Battlefields of WWII, recently published as a monograph by the publisher, Kehrer Verlag, considers the varied landscapes of North Africa that the soldier of WWII was forced to endure. Thousands of miles from home, untraveled and ignorant of lands and peoples outside his home country, he was dropped onto the shores of what must have seemed to him a dangerous and alien environment—his understanding of the land limited to stereotype, myth and the relevant army field manual. Some WWII battle sites, such as the D-Day beaches of Normandy, are well known and frequently visited. The critical battlefields of the North African campaign, are particularly inaccessible, both because of their geographic location and because they exist within a region that continues to be affected by political strife and violent upheavals. Yet, in 2011 and 2012, I spent several months traveling from Egypt to Tunisia to document remote WWII battlefields where Axis and Allied forces fought against each other and against the elements amid challenging terrain. The approach is conceptual, with the photographs of the North African battlefields presented, similar to the New Topographic photographers of previous generations, in an almost anonymous and neutral tone of voice. The images are taken in daylight, without complexity and noise, portraying a peaceful quietness of the desert and grassland to allow viewers to fill in that negative space with their own visualization of the war. 70 years have not yet eradicated traces of the fighting—campsites can still be found—evident by the amount of ration tins, trench systems and pill boxes that still carry the marks of battle. Unexploded shells, barbed wire and mines still litter the landscapes of North Africa and occasionally claim yet another victim, as if the very land itself is reminding us of the tragedy of war. These photographs depict the peaceful landscape that it is today, so very different from yesterday.