The Last Stand (softback)

We are very are privileged to be able to offer a new edition of this very special book

4th edition of The Last Stand.

This new edition has been redesigned in a larger soft cover format with lay flat pages that show the images to their full potential.

Between 2010 and 2014, Marc Wilson photographed the images that make up The Last Stand. This work aims to reflect the histories and stories of military conflict and the memories held in the landscape itself. The series is made up of 91 images and documents some of the physical remnants of the Second World War on the coastlines of the United Kingdom and northern Europe, focusing on military defence structures that remain and their place in the shifting landscape that surrounds them. Many of these locations are no longer in sight, either subsumed or submerged by the changing sands and waters or by more human intervention. At the same time others have re-emerged from their shrouds.

Over those four years Marc travelled 23,000 miles to 143 locations to capture these images along the coastlines of the UK, The Channel Islands, northern & western France, Denmark, Belgium and Norway.

From a review by Colin Pantall:

“It's large format work and it's quite beautiful (Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology may be the most recognised photography of sea defences but that's a different kind of book) . Everything is shot in subdued diffused light, the pre-dawn it looks like much of the time, and the way in which the different defences merge and crumble into the landscape of which they are now part.

The Last Stand is as multi-layered as the landscapes which it features; there's historical detail wrapped folded over into a chronotopia of functional brutalism, mixed with local touches that feeds into the geological, panoramic and tactical.

All the boxes are ticked in Robert Adams traditional landscape list: there's geography, autobiography, and metaphor. But on top of that, Wilson gives us a politicised view of landscape and power that ties back to survey photography of Timothy O'Sullivan and the work of Mitch Epstein.

Layered into that is an Arcadian vision. With its focus on Northern Europe it's a dystopian Arcadia; there is a pagan feel to Wilson's pictures, a syncretic vision where geology, flora, climate and war find a single expression. And it's beautiful.”

Fourth edition of 1500 copies
128 pages / 240mm x 294mm
64 photographs, research text and map
Papers by GF Smith - Colorplan and Munken Natural
Litho printed and sewn bound
ISBN 978-1-8380236-5-2
Design by Robert Shaw
Research text by Eliane Wilson
Afterword by Roy Exley
Printed at Taylor Brothers in Bristol
Published by two&two press
Published by two&two press
Text by Eliane Wilson
Foreword by Rox Exley
Design by Robert Shaw at Northbank.
ISBN: 978-1-8380236-0-7