The aerial perspective in a museum context : above Flanders Fields 1914-1918

During World War I millions of aerial photographs were taken documenting a cultural landscape from which the relicts sometimes remain visible as scars on the landscape. Most often, however, this landscape is preserved beneath the surface as archaeological heritage, invisible to the hundreds of thousands of annual visitors to the ypres Salient (the frontlines around ypres) and the local inhabitants of the area. Since 2006 the Department of Archaeology (Ghent University) and the In Flanders Fields Museum have investigated the archaeological potential of these historical aerial photographs. This chapter explains how thousands of these images are now converted into a primary source on their own and are being used to tell the story of World War I in a museum providing a bird’s-eye view of the conflict landscape.During World War I millions of aerial photographs were taken documenting a cultural landscape from which the relicts sometimes remain visible as scars on the landscape. Most often, however, this landscape is preserved beneath the surface as archaeological heritage, invisible to the hundreds of thousands of annual visitors to the ypres Salient (the frontlines around ypres) and the local inhabitants of the area. Since 2006 the Department of Archaeology (Ghent University) and the In Flanders Fields Museum have investigated the archaeological potential of these historical aerial photographs. This chapter explains how thousands of these images are now converted into a primary source on their own and are being used to tell the story of World War I in a museum providing a bird’s-eye view of the conflict landscape.B