Unseen Waterloo is a
series of photographs by Sam Faulkner which explores how we remember
the human face of conflict from a time before photography.
The Battle of
Waterloo is one of the greatest in history. Napoleon and Wellington,
two of the finest military leaders of all time, faced each other. on
18 June 1815. For nine hours 2oo,ooo men fought one of the most
intense and bitter battles the world has seen. By sunset the world
had changed.
Since 2oo9, Faulkner
has travelled to the annual Waterloo re-enactment in Belgium to
photograph the ‘soldiers’ who take part, dressed in the
historically accurate uniforms, created with painstaking attention to
detail. From his pop-up studio on the battlefield, Faulkner has made
dramatic and painterly portraits which evoke the forgotten faces of
Waterloo and re-imagine their moments of hope, glory and defeat.
The images hang
against a backdrop of Hainsworth fabric, the rich scarlet woollen
cloth worn by the British ‘redcoat’ soldiers at Waterloo and
still made today at the original West Yorkshire mill.
‘Unseen Waterloo:
The Conflict Revisited is my attempt to re-imagine the non-existent
portraits from 1815. Waterloo is often cast as a battle between Great
Men and certainly we’ve all seen the grand paintings of Napoleon
and Wellington. However, we don’t have personal images of the men
who actually fought and died that day. A hundred years later, after
the First World War, the fallen soldiers’ names were chiselled in
granite in every town in Europe. This work attempts to reclaim the
Battle of Waterloo for those who fought and have been lost to
history’, Sam Faulkner 2o15.
Unseen Waterloo The
Conflict Revisited, the book, is published to coincide with the
exhibition at Somerset House.
The book has a first
print run of 1815 copies plus 200 numbered Artist's editions. It will
be officially launched at Somerset House on 18th June 2015, the 200th
anniversary of the battle.
It is a a large
photo book measuring approximately 370 x 290mm with around 240 pages.
The book will
include three texts; A preface by Sam Faulkner, the artist; A
historical essay by writer Nicholas Foulkes; and an essay about the
art inspired by Waterloo by art historian Satish Padiyar.
The Editions
The Unseen Waterloo
Book will be available in 3 exclusive and limited editions.
Limited to a print
run of just 1815 copies, the 1815 Edition is beautifully finished in
blue cloth with a silver map of the order of battle debased on the
cover. The 1815 edition is £50.
Artists Edition.png
Presented in a
bespoke slip case and individually numbered and signed by the
photographer, the Artist's Edition will be limited to 200 copies. It
will be a true collector's book. The launch price for the Artist's
Edition is £200 and will increase as the edition sells out.
TRL02.png
The Thin Red Line
Edition is hand bound in the same fabric worn by the British Redcoats
at the Battle of Waterloo. Still manufactured by Hainsworth in
Yorkshire this fabric is the origin of the "thin red line"
and is part of their Waterloo Collection. The cover design of the
battlefield of Waterloo is embroidered in silver thread.
The book comes
presented in a bespoke solander box also made of Hainsworth.
The Thin Red Line
Edition will be hand bound and will be limited to just 25 copies. Ten
copies have already been allocated. The launch price for the Thin Red
Line Edition is £1000.
If you would like to
order or find out more about either the Artist's Edition or the Thin
Red Line edition please email info@unseenwaterloo.co.uk
The books will also
be available at the Rizzoli Book Shop at Somerset House.
Sam Faulkner grew up
in Norwich. After graduating in philosophy from King’s College
London in 1994, he immediately went to Afghanistan looking for
adventure and with a dream of becoming a reportage photographer. He
has worked around the world for The Telegraph Magazine, The
Independent, The Sunday Times Magazine, GQ , Esquire, Vogue, Stern
and Paris Match among many others.
In 2001 Faulkner
started shooting Cocaine Wars, a long term project about the
collateral damage of the war on drugs in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru,
Brazil, Haiti, Mexico and the USA.
He lives in London
with his wife and two young children.
Unseen Waterloo is
Faulkner’s first project to be represented by Hamiltons Gallery in
London.
To find out more
about Sam's work visit www.samfaulkner.co.uk
Waterloo
200-year anniversary: The myths of the battle that changed history.
Or maybe not...
 |
Ahead of the 200th
anniversary next week, John Lichfield dissects the myths that
continue to surround the significance of Wellington’s defeat of
Napoleon in a field outside Brussels
|
JOHN LICHFIELD
Author Biography Friday 12 June 2015 /
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/waterloo-200year-anniversary-the-myths-of-the-battle-that-changed-history-or-maybe-not-10317108.html
Two centuries ago
next week, a rag-tag European army led by an Irish general defeated
the French near a village south of Brussels. Next Thursday, Friday
and Saturday 5,000 people will dress up in old uniforms to stage the
most ambitious ever re-enactment of “The Battle That Changed
History”.
There has been great
excitement about the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo in
Britain; much less so in France. The old enemies agree, nonetheless,
in perpetuating myths about Waterloo (starting with the dubious
proposition that the battle “changed history”).
Both countries
persist in believing that Waterloo was a British – or even an
“English” – victory. Both say that the battle brought to an end
150 years of French supremacy. Both believe that Waterloo made
Britain, briefly, the western world’s “Top Nation”.
Waterloo
conveniently marks the end of many things. It was the direct cause –
properly speaking – of very few.
Myth 1. The British
victory
The Duke of
Wellington is alleged to have said that the battle was won on “the
playing fields of Eton”. No, it was not – unless that school took
a lot of foreign students. Many of the “British” soldiers at next
week’s three-day “Waterloo 2” – as re-made for TV – will be
Dutch or Belgians or Americans. Many of the “French” soldiers
will be Scandinavian, Swiss, Russian or British.
In the case of the
“British” army, this multi-national force of enthusiasts will be
historically correct. On 18 June 1815, Wellington, born in Dublin of
Irish ancestry, led a European army, long before such ideas enraged
the readers of the Daily Express or Daily Mail.
More than half of
Wellington’s own force consisted of Hannoverians, Saxons, Dutch and
Belgians. About a quarter of the 120,000 soldiers who defeated
Napoleon at Waterloo were “British” – and maybe one in eight
were English
Of the 32 infantry
regiments in Wellington’s army of about 70,000, only 18 were
British, of which seven were from Scotland. Modern historians
estimate that one in three of the soldiers in the “English”
regiments were from Ireland. Of the 12 cavalry brigades, seven were
British and many of their regiments were German. Half the 29
batteries of guns were Hannoverian, Dutch or Belgian.
None of these
numbers include the 53,000 Prussians who turned up eventually and
swung the battle Wellington’s way, just when the French were
pushing for a late victory.
Colin Brown, author
of The Scum of the Earth, one of the most interesting of the crop of
bicentenary books about Waterloo, writes: “Victorian jingoism
fuelled one of the most persistent myths about Waterloo: that it was
a British – or even more inaccurately, an English victory.” This
re-imagined battle has helped to create, he suggests, the self-image
of “plucky little Albion” which shapes British attitudes towards
the EU to this day.
Myth 2. Waterloo
changed history
Waterloo genuinely
was significant. It marked the end of 750 years of intermittent
Anglo-French conflict. The two nations have not fought each other
since (give or take a few skirmishes in Africa and the Middle East).
The 1,000-year war continues but only in French-bashing tabloid
headlines, or in French-teasing books by Stephen Clarke.
Waterloo roughly
marks the point when French domination of the western world ended and
a century or so of British supremacy began. Hence, in part, France’s
unwillingness to send a senior representative to next week’s
festivities.
It should be
remembered, however, that in 2005 France refused to mark the
bicentenary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest
victory. The French are still unable to decide whether Napoleon,
though he might have been a Great Man, was, fundamentally, a Good
Thing.
Did the Emperor’s
defeat at Waterloo destroy the French supremacy which began in the
mid-1600’s? Not really. Until the early 19th century, France was
the wealthiest and most populous country in the western world (28
million people compared to 18 million in Britain in 1800). In the
18th century, it had provided the international language, the
international dress standards, the international culture and most of
the new, abstract ideas.
France was the
United States of the day: the global reference point, arrogant,
aggressive, oblivious. During that time, France lost battles, and
even wars, to the British and others, but its supremacy continued.
Arguably, Trafalgar, fought at the zenith of Napoleon’s powers in
1805, was more significant than Waterloo. If the British fleet had
lost that battle, there would have been little to prevent a French
invasion of England and a prolonged domination of Europe.
By 1815, this French
ascendency was crumbling. The loss at Waterloo was a symptom of
France’s fragility after a destructive revolution and 23 years of
bloody wars. If Napoleon had won, he would probably have lost the
next battle. Russian and Austrian armies were queuing to fight him.
Equally, by 1815, British economic strength was becoming
irresistible. Between 1780 and 1820, industrial output doubled.
Britain did not send many of its own soldiers to fight Napoleon (they
were fighting the Americans) but its wealth subsidised, or bought,
the other “allied” armies.
The French economy
meanwhile was losing ground. The historian Simon Schama in his book
on the French revolution, Citizens, points out that the Ancien Régime
was not so “ancient”. Before 1789, the French monarchy had
started to follow Britain down the route to factory-driven economic
power. That progress was frozen for nearly 30 years by the Revolution
which, according to stubborn French historians, invented Modern
Times.
Just as importantly,
by 1815 the number of people in Britain and the future Germany was
catching up with France. The French started practising contraception,
mostly through coitus interruptus, 20 years or so before the British
and Germans did. At the same time, the survival rate of infants in
all European countries improved dramatically.
There was a critical
period of two decades at the end of the 18th century when the French
population grew slowly but Britain’s surged. This relative baby
bust was enough to put the trajectory of French demography onto a
lower course than Britain or Germany (or later the US). If France had
grown from 1780 onwards at the same rate as Germany and Britain, it
would have a population of more than 100 million today.
After 1815, France
would never again be top nation, because it was no longer the biggest
and wealthiest country and could no longer muster the most money and
the biggest armies. That was nothing to do with Waterloo.
Britain did briefly
become Top Nation – but it was never a military power. Its
strengths were those of a new industrial and global trading world and
a booming population. That was nothing to do with Waterloo.
If Wellington had
lost, Britain would have been shaken but the population would have
continued to grow. The Lancashire cotton mills and Birmingham metal
foundries would have continued to build the world’s first
industrial (for good or ill) society.
If Wellington had
lost, the British fleet would have still stood between Napoleon and
an invasion of England.
The “real
Waterloo”, the battle which established British economic and
political dominance in the 19th century, was won in Lancashire’s
cotton mills.
For France, the
“real Waterloo”, the population and economic battle, was lost on
the barricades and – irony of ironies – in the marital bed.
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