While my photos may not be the most breathtaking shots and do little justice to the beauty and utter magnificence of the places I’ve visited, I cherish them because they record my travels in ways that I could never record in a journal.
For instance, take this photo of a plaque on an external wall at one of the Oxford colleges.
It’s dedicated to the members of the colleges who perished in service during the Second World War. You can find such plaques at the colleges in Cambridge as well, and the lists of the names of the fallen can be quite long. For me, they served as a subtle but powerful reminder of the effect that the war had in Europe.
I was surprised by how much I could feel the presence of the war, especially in London, and even after so many years. There were countless memorials scattered throughout the landscape, and even a few dedicated to American soldiers. And since the bombings of London did so much destruction, each building and neighborhood had its own little story to tell.
For example, Inner Temple was all but destroyed during the bombings. Many of its facilities had to be rebuilt after the war, its buildings look ridiculously, sadly new next to the history-laden, centuries-old Middle Temple campus. However, Middle Temple has its scars as well; it lost a portion of one building, which was rebuilt using the original materials after the war. A black-and-white photo showing the damage immediately after the bombings also hangs in the building.
I’ve been to Andersonville Cemetery and a few Civil War battle sites in the U.S., but nothing ever moved me as much as seeing the effects of the bombings at the Temples. Perhaps what was most disturbing was witnessing the way that war had invaded the public space, affecting the landscape beyond any militarized zones, battlefields or war memorials. I experienced a sort of memorial in the least expected of places, a reminder of the totality of war and the many unexpected (and expected) consequences it can have.
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