Post WW1 regeneration - a photographic exhibition in London

Roehampton, patients being taught to use new artificial limbs, IWM 

Making a New World consisted of commemorative exhibitions, instal­l­at­ions and experiences at the Imperial War Museum, London. Climaxing on 2018’s Remembrance Day with a series of events to mark war’s end, it explored how WW1 shaped the society we live in today. The best poster was an Evening Standard bill­board with the single word in red: Peace. But peace was only the start. The themes of the rooms were: 

Renewal: Life after WW1, 

Re­building Society, 

Rebuilding the Individual and 

Reshaping the World.

Renewal: Life after WW1 in Photographs, one part of Making a New World, was in just three rooms. It showed 130 black and photographs from the museum’s enormous archive, plus contemporary documents and the odd artefact thrown in eg a grotesque head from a cathedral in France, nicked by British soldiers as a souvenir.

Post-WW1 countries, cities and individuals had to regenerate and rebuild themselves on a huge scale as a new world emerged. Through a rich coll­ection of photographs, visitors dis­covered the innovation and resourcefulness that shaped the rebuilding and regeneration of the world post-war, revealing resilience and creativity in times of great change.

Reconstructive Plastic Surgery, IWM

Highlighting the ways in which individual lives, landscapes and national identities recovered, evolved and even flourished in the aftermath of war, this extensive collection of photographs, documents and objects examined renewal and the complex process of reconstructing a home, town or cont­in­ent. From images of refugees returning to ruined homes, through the re­construction of Ypres, to battlefields depicting the destroyed villages and were never rebuilt, these rarely seen photo­graphs from this little-explored time period revealed the extent of destruction and change in war-torn Europe and beyond.

Photographs told more than words: the Amiens couple with their little boy gazing at the devastation that was once their home; the exuberance of the swarm of soldiers piled up on a vehicle for the Armistice parade. Rebuilding was correct when it came to the devastation of the cathedral in Amiens, or the jolly cigarette shop that sprang up in the ruins of Ypres, but also model housing schemes built here. A sad note observed that residents often felt that their nice new dwellings had less community spirit than the old homes.

The photos charted the initial optimism that followed WW1, as well as the realities of displacement, demobilisation, soc­ial change and the fall of empires. Many individuals found them­sel­ves in new nat­ions as borders were re-drawn and empires ended, but while the devastating effects of war were felt all over, dev­elop­ments in materials and new technologies also led to innovat­ions. Reshaping the World had the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles with one photo of the sheer swarms of observers and press in the Hall of Mirrors.

Military equipment was repurposed for civilian use and advan­ces in medicine and plastic surgery enabled the reconstruction of bodies. So Rebuilding the Individual was optimistic but painfully literal. There were pictures of legless soldiers being trained to use pros­thetic limbs and a Captain Francis Derwent measuring a disfigured former soldier for facial reconstruction.

Of course photos couldn’t show the mental scars. But this Exhib­ition inspir­ingly revealed the stren­g­th, inventiveness and brill­iance of people after a horrific war, during times of unrivalled social and political change. The prosthetic limbs, for which there was great demand, increased the will of the medical profession to help the young men who gave so much to their country.

A refugee family returning to Amiens, 17 September 1918, IWM

First World War Propaganda Poster, IWM 

There were also fascinating photos of the conflicts that persisted or began after the war. Some derived from the Russian Revolution, between communist and anti-communist forces. Some were forgot­ten. One picture showed a British plane flying over the mountains of Iraq, and there was a finely structured photo of Ukrainian troops clambering up a hill in snow. Some soldiers were saved from unem­p­loyment by joining the permanent forces eg the optimistic poster called See the World and Get Paid For Doing It. More realistic photos showed soldiers in the Indian-Afghanistan mountains.

This exhibition, which ended in 2019, may have been small but it constantly promoted questions. In its documentation of the scale of the cost and consequences of the war, it showed WW1 to be as horrific as our grandparents said.