While on my walk in Peterborough the other day, I stopped at the set of “war memorials” adjacent to the Town House.
I always figuratively shake my head when folks use that term “war memorial”. For what is being memorialized is not war, but rather those people who did not survive the war. To my mind, the less frequently used term “soldiers and sailors memorial” is, perhaps, a much better moniker. But, I digress.
The World War I memorial has a good bit of text, in addition to the list of names. I began to explore this text though my viewfinder. I was looking for “interesting” juxtapositions of words which might, in isolation, have some meaning. I made only one (possibly) successful photo (the first in the set below) which might be titled “Hardships Enduring”. I say possibly because this frame contains a third whole word in addition to the two word “message”. My feeling is that it would be stronger without this.
I plan to keep looking for such photos but I suspect that they will be hard to come by given the amount of happenstance needed to get meaningful words in the same frame. Time will tell.
After studying (and photographing) the text for a while, I turned my attention to the list of names on the memorials. At first, I was trying to frame photographs that included rows of full (i.e. first and last) names. I dawned on me that this was not really meaningful as it was too specific, too personal.
I then had the thought to concentrate on sections that contained only the first names of those being memorialized. Each first name in these photographs stands for the many “Roberts” or “Johns”* who died rather than the specific one on this specific memorial.
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* As one might expect the large majority of names were male. However, I was struck by the presence of two female name on the Korean War Memorial.