DEAD GROUND, Paul Gough

This book was produced in partnership with Sansom and Company

‘Dead ground’ is a tract of terrain militaria hidden from view, an unreachable land in a given battlefield, a zone of opportunity obscured from direct observation by the terrain or the limitations of weaponry.

Dead Ground remembers the First World War through spaces of traumatic memory, places peppered with plaques and memorials, terrain connected by countless military cemeteries, the ‘Silent Cities’ of a war that ended a century ago but reverberates in our imagination.

Through a series of illustrated essays, Gough revisits the battle-torn lands of Belgium, France, Macedonia and Turkey to investigate a terrain torn apart by war and then rebuilt by memory. He examines the visual representations of ‘dead ground’: how the vast emptiness of the deserted
battlefields was recreated in paint and film; and how the ‘dis-membered’ parts of the traumatised land and its peoples were ‘re-membered’. Drawing from recent travels across the Western Front, Gallipoli, and Macedonia, and from site work in New York and London, Gough also explores the future of commemoration and the imagery of peace, and delves deeper into the persisting visual cultures of war.