Dundas native Dianne Bos’s cameras bring to life the First World War battlefields
Dundas native Dianne Bos’s cameras bring to life the First World War battlefields of northern France and Belgium
Dianne Bos was walking through a First World War battlefield southeast of Ypres in Belgium when she slipped on some wet grass and slid into the mud of an old bomb crater.
Bos’s cameras went flying and she found herself lying on her back, looking up into the sky.
It was at that point that the ghosts of the battlefield — the unrecovered ones, the ones now part of the soil of Hill 62 — entered her art.
“I had this sickening feeling, wondering how many had died on that very same spot, lying on the ground, looking up,” explains Bos, standing in the middle of her new photo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
“And I started thinking, what was the last thing they saw? Was it the stars? Was it the things flying overhead?”
The stars may have been visible through the smoke at night and, without a doubt, there would have been many things flying overhead — dirt, shrapnel, body parts, bullets, perhaps even the occasional flower ripped from its roots.
That moment in the spring of 2014 became the inspiration for the series of 35 photos that make up “The Sleeping Green. No man’s land 100 years later.”
It was a troubled time for Bos, an internationally-respected artist who grew up in Dundas.
Her mother had recently died of cancer.
As well, Bos had lost her life’s work the year before to the Bow River flooding in Calgary, where she now lives. The water, mud and sludge had
entered her home studio and destroyed 30 years worth of her art.
Bos turned the page by flying to France and taking on a new project, photographing the battlefields of the First World War, a century after its start.
It was that moment at Hill 62, however, that would bring something unique to her art. Bos is best known
as a pinhole photographer, making her own cameras out of simple boxes, some small and some the size of a van. It’s the simplest form of photography — no lenses, just a pinhole cut into the box.
Exposures tend to be long in pinhole, two to three minutes, so that each image captures a period of time rather than an instinct, often adding an eerie feel to the scene.
Bos added to this in the printing stage, throwing objects onto the image on the photographic paper as it developed on the enlarger.
Sometimes the objects were items she had found on the battlefields, bits of stone, twigs and flowers, even a bullet that had been given to her by another visitor to no man’s land.
“It’s almost like a performance piece in the dark room,” says Bos, describing the process. “It’s like creating a shadow of those things on the image.”
To represent the night sky, Bos overlaid astronomy charts onto the images, depicting the stars as they would have appeared at the time of battle.
Perhaps Bos’s most striking darkroom work was done by shining a flashlight through a slit in a sheet of black paper onto her image of Frezenberg Ridge, the place where the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry held the line in 2015 at great cost.
The exposure created a blood-red streak across the muddy field.
“Every flashlight seems to bring a different colour. Some are blue. That one happened to be red,” says Bos, 61, a graduate of Parkside high school before studying art at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.
Bos devoted three years to the project, making three trips to northern France and Belgium at different times of the year to give her varying samples of sunlight.
She finished it in time for it to be exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris last year to help mark the 100th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge.
Her husband, University of Calgary English professor Harry Vandervlist also became involved. Vandervlist has taught wartime verse as one of his courses and has contributed several original editions of collections from the war years to the exhibition.
Vandervlist also introduced Bos to the poem from which the exhibition took its name, “Break of Day in the Trenches” by English poet Isaac Rosenberg who died in 1918 in northern France during the German Army’s spring offensive.
The poem is about a “queer sardonic rat” that scurries between the German and British lines.
“... Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between ...”