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The Sleeping Green, No Man’s Land 100 Years Later.

While trying to find a good vantage point from which to photograph, I accidentally slid down the edge of a crater. Upon catching my breath, I stared into the sky framed by trees gently swaying around the edge of the field crater and felt engulfed by paralyzing sadness. The enormity of the deaths and injuries that occurred in this exact location overwhelmed me.  Had someone fallen in this exact spot? What did they see in their last moments?  Dianne Bos

Beginning in 2014 with the centenary of the start of WW1, Dianne Bos began taking photographs in ‘no‐man’s land’ between the trenches on the former Western Front. From 2015-2016, she travelled through the battle sites in France and Belgium where Canadian soldiers fought. She used a variety of vintage and pinhole cameras to photograph the land a century after the Great War.

These are all unique images created using a process different from the one art audiences have come to know over Dianne’s last 18 years with the Kostuik Gallery. While making the prints in the darkroom, Bos layered these photographs with found objects related to the events, such as poppies, bullets, or stones. The result is a series of complex visual images, each one unique and irreproducible (even when using the same negative). By scattering objects over the paper during printing, as well as dodging and burning, the artist produces layers of imagery, which conveys the emotional depth of these historic battle sites. Photographs from this series were first exhibited in a 2015 traveling exhibition curated by Director/Curator Josephine Mills for the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Alberta Canada and then exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, France in 2017.