Chloe Dewe Mathews

On 23 May Ivorypress will present the exhibition Shot at Dawn by British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews (London, 1982) as part of the festival Off PhotoEspaña. Shot at Dawn focuses on the sites at which soldiers from the British, French and Belgian armies were executed for cowardice and desertion during the First World War. The two-year project involved in-depth primary research to create images of twenty-three locations at which the soldiers were shot or held in the period leading up to their execution. All are seasonally accurate and were taken as close as possible to the precise time of day at which the executions occurred.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Ivorypress that provides a visual record of the project as well as a critical analysis of the work by writer Geoff Dyer and contextual essays about the crimes of cowardice and desertion and the psychological trauma caused by military service by historians Hew Strachan and Helen McCartney. ‘These pictures show what was lost—and what remains of that loss,’ says Dyer. ‘[…] from the moment that the time of an individual life stopped, through the long aftermath of the catastrophe which engulfed the landscape, to a present which may or may not be steeped in forgetfulness. At which point the question of time becomes impossible to separate from that of memory.’

Shot at Dawn was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford as part of 14–18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions. The exhibition at Ivorypress will be open until 16 July after having travelled to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Tate Modern in London and Stills in Edinburgh, among other spaces. The project has been sponsored by the British photographic laboratory Genesis Imaging and has been supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund and by the British Council, Government of Flanders, John Fell OUP Research Fund and Van Houten Fund.