![]() (Photo credit: Fred Morley / Original title: Delivery After Raid). Publishing results of German bombings in newspapers would alert the Germans that the countermeasures were working. The British government censored the bombing pictures particularly because the British were actively using countermeasures to disrupt the German navigational beams, resulting in Luftwaffe planes regularly bombing the countryside instead of cities for a few months. The government made a point that daily life will go on as normal as possible, that defiance was picked up and carried through to every single person, not only in London but everywhere that those bombs fell.īy the end of the Blitz, around 30,000 Londoners would be left dead, with another 50,000 injured. The censors felt the same way and it was published the very next day. ![]() The photo pushed forward the idea of the stoic British continuing on with their normal lives. Morley’s thinking was that to circumvent censorship of demoralizing pictures of ruined streets, after more than a month of daily bombings, he should present things as an object lesson in the maxim “Keep calm and carry on”. It was one of a series of three posters that would be issued in the event of war (the others read ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness. He then got his assistant to pose among the ruins of a city street while the firefighters fought in the background. A man appearing to keep calm and carry on delivering milk during the WWII Blitz on London, but actually this photo was staged. The now-ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ phrase was chosen for its clear message of ‘sober restraint’ and was coined by the shadow Ministry of Information at some point between 27 June and 6 July 1939. Morley first found a backdrop of firefighters struggling to contain a fire then he borrowed a milkman’s outfit and a craft of bottles. He exemplified the keep calm and carry on attitude. The only thing is that, in a way, the picture was staged. A milkman makes his deliveries over rubble while firefighters continue to battle hotspots on December 30. The photographer Fred Morley took the picture of a London milkman deliberately picking his way over the rubble. Photographers stationed in London were amazed at the total destruction wrought by German bombers yet their pictures were routinely blocked by the censors who were anxious not to cause a panic and also not to let the Germans know exactly where their bombs had hit. The above photograph was taken on October 9th after a German aerial raid. The Blitz ended on May 11, 1941, when Hitler called off the raids in order to move his bombers east in preparation for Germany’s invasion of Russia. The purpose was to demoralize the population and force the British to come to terms. Fires consumed many portions of the city. For the next consecutive 57 days, London was bombed either during the day or night. It was the beginning of the Blitz – a period of intense bombing of London and other cities in Great Britain that continued until the following May. This concentrated direct bombing of industrial targets and civilian centers began on 7 September 1940, with heavy raids on London. The appearance of German bombers in the skies over London introduced a new weapon of terror and destruction in the arsenal of twentieth-century warfare. ICON asks you to re-examine these images, with people who often feel disreqarded or iqnored now centre staqe.The photo pushed forward the idea of the stoic British continuing on with their normal lives. The group recreated fifteen photographs, in some posing alongside colleagues from Crisis and Arts at the Old Fire Station, making it a truly collaborative experience. The photographs were selected due to their iconic status and include representations of some of the most recognisable and famous people, or moments, in recent British history. The project exposed them to the technical craft of great photography and the complex logistics involved - from composition and lighting to make-up and prop sourcing - but it also enabled them to think deeply together about their emotional engagement with the images, generating feelings ranging between celebratory, nostalgic, social, political and traumatic. A group of artists who have experienced homelessness worked with Rory Carnegie to learn about the different aspects of making a photograph through investigating iconic imagery. ICON is the culmination of a project which explores what makes an image iconic. Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford, OX12AQ
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