In seemingly quiet landscapes trail echoes and traces of the bloodiest battles that occurred in Europe from antiquity to Second World War.

Taken from different distances, from vast landscapes to close details, the images of the New York-based Belgian photographer Bart Michiels are a poetic, moving attempts to understand and possibly represent such complex spaces.

The tragic histories of these fields, hills and beaches are only revealed in the captions. The details of the event that took place in each site function as epiphanies of life and death as well as of our collective memory.

A closing and generous Selected Readings section quotes a series of significant texts to accompany these beautiful photographs, paving the way to further reflections on the sense and consequences of war.

Bart Michiels, The Course of History
156 pp., € 49.00
Damiani Editore