What can photographs say about the unimaginable? in some smothering dreams takes our gaze to the First World War, where official photographer Henry Armytage Sanders created the most extensive visual record of New Zealanders on the Western Front. But rather than being an archive of slaughter, Sanders’ photographs often depict the faces of men behind the lines and the landscapes left in the war’s wake.
Using details from the original glass plate negatives, Camus Wyatt reimagines these photographs as places of strange beauty, capturing both a profound quiet and a looming sense of dread. With an essay by Deidra Sullivan on the history of the Sanders collection and the possible meanings of their reimagining, in some smothering dreams is a moving contemplation of the pathways between image, archive, the lives of others, and the limits of our understanding.
