Photo essay Photojournalism

The magazine of the photo-essay

February 2020 issue

“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker

by Dara McGrath

Project Cleansweep takes its name from a Ministry of Defence report issued in 2011. The report assessed the risk of residual contamination at sites in the United Kingdom used in the manufacture, storage, and disposal of chemical and biological weapons from World War I to the present day. Project Cleansweep looks beyond the risk assessment to the ways that landscapes are psychologically charged by their history. Examining the sites of the official investigation and many more, including sites used for both chemical and biological weapons activities during the Cold War, Project Cleansweepfollows traces that lead to military bases and government facilities, grocery stores and holiday parks. The images take us into the country lanes of Dorset and Devon, the Peak District, the woodlands of Yorkshire and out across the open rolling countryside of the Salisbury Plain, all the way from the coastlines of East Anglia, the West Counties and Wales to the remote Scottish Highlands and the Irish Sea. Over 4,000 sq kilometres of the landmass was

appropriated for military use in the 20th century, marking the influence of military activities upon British landscapes and provoking deeper consideration of their lasting social and environmental impacts. Project Cleansweeppresents unexpected vistas that challenge conventional understandings of place. This work also reminds us that war is domestic, one that employs thousands of people in production processes akin to activities in other industries. As we recognise the inheritances of the past, the places pictured here become interstitial; they seem to exist between past and present, public and private, civilian and military. Here, too, the pastoral myths of the bucolic British landscape — of simple nature, a golden past — are disrupted by material realities embedded in the landscape itself. As we contemplate these images our perspectives shift, and yet a different kind of beauty persists. The photographs in this book resist such cleansweeping. They snag and scratch the viewing eye. They oblige the mind to stop, look, enquire. Easy answers are not given, but an archive is compiled that rises in reverberation as it grows in length. The organisation of the documents within the book is painstakingly patterned. Echoes start to move between images, across sites. “Dr. Robert MacFarlane, University of Cambridge”