What a night, my little head is all shell-shocked.


Since midnight it has been impossible to sleep; the humming from planes, the anti-aircraft bombs, the machine gun noise.


I went downstairs because I could not sleep, after 15 minutes it went quiet, thinking it would be better I went back to bed, what a mistake!

All night the humming from planes, it was non-stop.


What a joy when waking this morning, someone announces there was a landing at Dives.


At 8.20am a bomb falls on the Printemps store, another one on the Normandy.

By rule we don’t have the right to leave Deauville, nor to ride our bicycles.


The weather remained foggy until midday, the sun shone from 4pm. It must be the English who brought the clouds! 

The defence volunteers have the right to circulate tonight.


Around 6pm what a tremendous bang,it is the Mont Canisy. The English navy must have blown up a large battery piece that was shooting at them; it has been deafening us since this morning. I think the shot hit the target, as we can’t hear a thing anymore.


What will happen to us when the navy and air force deal with our region?


There is no electricity. Deauville is in the dark.


Odette Brefort, 6 June 1944.




On the 6th June 1944 allied forces launched the biggest amphibious military attack in history, landing along 50 miles of the heavily fortified Normandy coast and creating a significant dent in Hitler’s Atlantic wall. ‘Operation Overlord’ began the liberation of the German occupied coast of North West Europe; it was the beginning of the end of WW2.


The images were taken of the coastal surveillance bunkers that formed part of the Atlantic wall along the Normandy coast from Utah beach to Deauville. Using infrared film, a technology that was created by the military in WW2 to detect camouflage and expose a visual spectrum that’s invisible to the naked eye.


The diary entry from the 6th June 1944, belongs to Odette Brefort; she lived in Deauville during the German Occupation and throughout WW2. She was a member of the French Resistance, providing military intelligence on the German defenses by drawing intricate and beautiful maps to send to her comrades in Paris. 


When exhibiting this work previously, I printed the infrared images on to silk, a reference to another technology that was employed for the first time in WW2; escape maps were printed on to silks and stitched inside officers uniforms.

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