Peter Dekens’s *Shaky Ground* begins with a family death: a cousin, attempting to dismantle an unexploded shell, was badly injured and died the same evening in hospital. That childhood memory leads the Belgian photographer back to the Ypres Salient, where, a century after the First World War, the landscape appears restored while the ground below remains unsettled. Human remains and projectiles still surface whenever someone puts a spade into the soil; thousands of missing soldiers are presumed to lie undiscovered, alongside hundreds of thousands of unexploded shells. Dekens photographs a terrain whose calm surface is contradicted by what it withholds.
The book, published by The Eriskay Connection in 2018, is alert to who reads that terrain and how. Residents have developed an almost instinctive sensitivity to it, noting rises and dips in the road that pass unnoticed by the many tourists and travellers who cross the former front line. Dekens’s photographs attend to such local knowledge rather than to battlefield spectacle, tracing how a buried war persists in ordinary routines, in the ground itself, and in the habits of those who live above it.
Dekens’s photographs are accompanied by his own written text and by an essay from the Dutch historian Guido van Hengel, who proposes that European unification is best understood as a project rooted in the First World War. The book’s larger argument extends that history to the present: the peace settlement that followed 1918, and the European ideal that grew from it, now sit uneasily beside Brexit and current political pressures on the continent, while the memory of war fades.
At 112 pages and roughly 19.5 by 29 centimetres, in an Otastar softcover binding, *Shaky Ground* treats the book as a constructed object rather than a container for pictures. A substantial editorial and production group worked across the project: Dekens and designer Rob van Hoesel shaped the narrative construction; Joy Phillips handled text editing and proofreading; Carel Fransen contributed cartography; and the book was lithographed, produced, printed and bound by Sebastiaan Hanekroot, Jos Morree, Wilco Art Books and Patist respectively. In a field crowded with First World War commemorative volumes, this is a quieter and more precise project, one in which design, text and cartography carry as much of the argument as the photographs do.
