About The Exhibition

Bob Lang from 'Portraits' by Tim Macmillan
Image © Age Exchange 2004

The exhibition, designed by Deborah Ashforth, is the culmination of partnership activity between the charity, veterans' associations and museums. Interviews with veterans have taken place in port cities across England and form the heart of the exhibition together with a series of Time-Slice photographic portraits.

Cruel Sea is the first project of its kind ever undertaken. Built on 18 months of planning and preparation, its success lies in bringing together project partners from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. Veterans, museums, artists, filmmakers, voluntary associations and educational professionals have worked together to share and represent first hand experience of the war at sea.

Many of the veterans' memories presented in the exhibition had not previously been shared. Frequently veterans understated their achievements and their individual acts of heroism. For each their war at sea is engraved in their memories. The extraordinary and moving memories shared by the veterans led Age Exchange to focus the entire exhibition on the veterans' personal experience of the war at sea and not the textbook history of the service.

"While we are still fortunate to have the veterans among us it is important that we learn from their experience, honour their service, courage, endeavour and humour." (David Savill - Project Director)

The key elements of the exhibition include large panels of reminiscence text and personal photographs, sound and film from the veterans' interviews and a series of large-scale Time-Slice photographic portraits (with sound) by award winning photographic artist Tim Macmillan. In most cases the exhibition and portraits will tour museums together. Tim Macmillan's portraits will also tour some galleries independently. For more information about Time-Slice visit:    www.timeslicefilms.com

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All images (unless otherwise stated) courtesy of the Veterans' themselves
or © The Imperial War Museum, London