By Matt Johnston, Photobook Club

The lingering hangover of war is not a subject which has been neglected by the photographic community, but the effect of war on our physical landscape is often passed by for the immediate hit and raw power of traditional photojournalism, with a focus on the human effect.

Recently however, there has been a resurgence of interest in images depicting the traces of conflict on our physical surroundings, with the likes of Donovan Wylie’s ‘British Watchtowers’ and Paul Seawright’s work from Europe and Afghanistan. These images combine the context of human photojournalism with the aesthetics and order of the new topographic movement to provide a seemingly more measured and observational response to events.

Lately, two photographers, Jeff Brouws and Paul Shambroom have released work surveying key aspects of the military landscape in America. In the process, Shambroom and Brouws ask questions about our willingness to remember, forget and brush aside turbulent times in our history with the physical remnants of war.

Shambroom’s series, titled ‘Shrines’ focuses on old military hardware decommissioned and now erected as memorials, tourist attractions and historic monuments throughout America. He takes us from patriotic scenes where old tanks and artillery stand proudly with the star spangled banner at American legion posts, to the odd marriage of a church display, in which a replica missile is situated behind a large plaque in the shape of North America reading “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the LORD”.

What is perhaps most interesting to see in the series, is this diverse range of situations the ‘military taxidermy’ has been placed in.

PAUL SHAMBROOM

Hawk surface-to-air missile, first Baptist church, Covington, Ohio

All Images are Courtesy of the Artists

In one image (M117 General purpose 750lb bomb, American legion post 911, Wauconda, Illinois ) the legion post that has acquired the bomb has placed it on what appears to be the back corner of a building with parking spaces marked out in yellow paint, shrubs now surrounding the messy concrete plinth it sits on.

The M117 is kept nose down, only millimeters from the ground by the steel support it is attached to. With cracks in the car park emanating from the plinth, this feels like a reminder of the devastation caused by such weapons and certainly not a proudly displayed artifact showed-off at the front of the building ( UH-1H Huey helicopter, American legion post 201, Alpharetta, Georgia).

PAUL SHAMBROOM

M117 General purpose 750lb bomb, American legion post 911, Wauconda, Illinois

PAUL SHAMBROOM

UH-1H Huey helicopter, American legion post 201, Alpharetta, Georgia

In contrast, in Costa Mesa, California we find a decommissioned Panther jet lying grounded on the asphalt runway of a children’s play park (Grumman F9F Panther jet, Lions Park, Costa Mesa, California). Even here the power of the jet can be noticed as it (and its runway) takes centre stage in the park, though a rusted paint-job and child-friendly ladder to a modified cockpit belittle this somewhat.

It is difficult to say whether children climbing over a fighter jet once used as an attack aircraft in the Korean War shows a sign of willingness to forget or a need to remember. But this is exactly what Shambroom intended; for us to question our relationship with objects that have worked their way into different corners of our landscape and often, the back of our minds.

PAUL SHAMBROOM

Grumman F9F Panther jet, Lions Park, Costa Mesa, California

Brouws’ four-part project After Trinity: Remnants and Realities of America’s Nuclear Landscape’ does not look as closely at the afterlife of military hardware. Instead Brouws examines the physical scars on our landscape, and the proximity of everyday life to an extraordinary nuclear past.

JEFF BROUWS

Trinity Site #1, location of first atomic bomb detonation,  Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1987

In Part I – Early work we are presented with Brouws’ images from 1987-8, looking at additions to our landscape resulting from nuclear testing and nuclear defense systems.

Empty museums housing atomic bombs, decaying shelters, vaults destroyed by test blasts and the inclusion of stills from Operation Cue (Civil defense film 1955) add gravity to an almost Hopper-like feeling in your stomach that ‘something just happened here’. This uneasy feeling only gathers as Brouws highlights just how much the nuclear history of America has become embedded in our everyday lives.

JEFF BROUWS

Nevada Test Site #1, bank vault destroyed during “Priscilla” atomic test in 1957, Frenchman’s Flat, Nye County, Nevada 1988

JEFF BROUWS

Six stills from civil defense film Operation Cue, 1955D

Part II – Proximity juxtaposes the mundane visuals of small town America in North Dakota with the proximity to potentially devastating sites of Minuteman missile silos. The calmness of the domestic scenes as well as the missile sites seems very much at odds with the subject matter. While it is not surprising that there are no large banners or signage proclaiming the distance to such sites, the inclusion of this distance as well as the diptych/triptych layout, does pose questions of our ability to ignore.

As Mark Rawlinson commented on the images – Out of sight (Exhibition catalogue essay, After Trinity and Approaching Nowhere series (1987-2009), Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona, March 2010) Brouws’ calm visual style and scenes void of human presence while full of human traces combined to form a museum-like model, or record of places we can quite easily imagine have been witness to nuclear fallout.

JEFF BROUWS

Proximity IV View of NE Post Road, 2.5 miles from Minuteman III missile silo L-11, Flaxton, North Dakota  2009   - Proximity IV Minuteman III missile silo L-11

The latter parts of After Trinity show Brouws’ familiar Becher/Ruscha inspired cataloguing and collecting of objects we have known from Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations and the rest of the American Typologies series.

Here the camera falls on roadside signage of missile silos (The ABCs of WMDs) and Thirty-four Missile Silos near Minot. In both series, the volume of images creates an almost claustrophobic feeling, a reminder of the scale to which everyday landscapes are littered with the fallout from both an unstable nuclear past, and current climate, in which a missile silo has become the mundane object of Brouws’ eye.

The inclusion of these surveys helps to create the multi faceted documentation Brouws intended, a large body of work, thoroughly exploring one theme, through a varied, anthropological approach.

JEFF BROUWS

The ABCs of WMDs, Minuteman III missile silos signs, North Dakota 2009