As you probably remember, it was the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings a couple of months ago and there was a lot of emotional coverage of the commemorative events going down at the time. There was also a guy who got his entire back covered with a tattoo of the D-Day landings.
In case you don’t remember the coverage or haven’t seen Saving Private Ryan, the D-Day landings were the largest amphibious invasion that has ever taken place in history and it single handedly changed the course of the second World War. 200,000 Allied troops headed to the French coastline in 3000 aircraft and 7000 ships, where 156,000 of them landed on the French beaches – most by sea but 24,000 through the air – along 50 miles of the coast and proceeded to storm the French. There were heavy casualties on both sides but the Allies emerged the victors.
To commemorate the event, two photographers – Chris Helgren and Peter Macdiarmid – decided to take archived images from the 1944 event and rephotograph them now to see how they had changed in the 70 years since the D-Day landings. The results are haunting and beautiful, and a reminder of what may have been had the D-Day landings not been successful.
