Two trips, seven years apart, and I only worked out this week that they were ever the same project.
The first was August 2019, staying near Honfleur, when I went looking for Pegasus Bridge and came home with the Merville Battery and Ranville War Cemetery as well, almost by accident, because they happened to be close by and the light was good. The second was one afternoon this August, 2026, at Pointe du Hoc, Sainte-Mère-Église and Utah Beach, on a different camera, in black and white this time on purpose rather than by accident. Sixteen photographs, four essays, and as of this week, a print and a download for every one of them, live in the shop.
I’ve been writing the essays through September, one place at a time — The Merville Battery went up this week, Pointe du Hoc, Sainte-Mère-Église and Utah Beach are still to come — so this isn’t really an announcement, it’s more a confession that I hadn’t noticed the shape of the thing until I stood back from all of it at once. Nine places. Two armies. The same beach, four miles apart and two months apart, at Utah and Omaha. A bridge, then a battery, then a war cemetery, all in one afternoon in 2019, which I didn’t plan at the time and only recognise now as the actual order the war happened in.
I went back and forth for a long time on whether the 2019 photographs — shot in colour, on a Canon 6D Mark II — belonged next to the 2026 ones, shot in monochrome on a Fujifilm X-T2. In the end I re-exported the older ones in black and white and swapped them in. Not because the colour was wrong, but because colour kept insisting these were places, and I wanted them to be time instead. Once everything was the same grey, the collection stopped being a set of D-Day sites and started being one thing: what these nine places look like now — car parks, ice cream vans, roses growing up a casemate wall — and what’s still underneath all of it, if you go looking.
There’s a frame at Pointe du Hoc that’s just a slab of bunker roof and the grass around it, nothing else in the shot, and for a long time I didn’t think it earned its place. It’s in the shop now, because I finally understood what it was doing there — the emptiness is the history, not a gap in my coverage.
Not everything I shot made the cut, either. Ranville has ten named graves I photographed, and I’ve kept every one of them out of the shop — they’re in the blog, with names, and that’s where they should stay. The one exception is A Crew, five headstones together, because five together reads as a crew and not as any one man’s grave. That felt like the right line to draw, though I moved it more than once before I was sure.
All sixteen are up now — as WhiteWall prints on Ilford or Baryta paper, and as full-resolution downloads — in their own corner of the shop: prints and downloads. The essays will keep arriving through the month, one place at a time, same as always.
Any photo on this site is available as a print. → Ask me.