The Course of History

Lepanto, Waterloo, Verdun, Stalingrad. The photographs comprising The Course of History by the Belgian-born, New York-based artist Bart Michiels (born 1964) show seemingly innocent landscapes and confined views of nature, some romantically beautiful, others sombre and desolate. Nevertheless, the chosen sites are the battlefields of the most barbarous combats in European history. Michiels revisits these sites many, sometimes even hundreds of, years after the clash. Thus, history has left the scene though these empty fields remain and play an important role to this day as silent witnesses to the historic events and, furthermore, as sites of memory...This is the first extensive publication of the photographic series, many of the photographs having been unpublished so far.