‘The name of Mametz Wood,’ writes Robin Barlow, ‘perhaps like that of Aberfan or Senghenydd, is embedded deep in the Welsh psyche, immediately conjuring up images of needless loss of life, bravery, chaos, and self-sacrifice.’ On the morning of 7 July 1916, the 38th (Welsh) Division began its first major engagement of the Somme offensive: capture Mametz Wood, the largest wood on the Somme battlefront, from the elite Lehr Regiment of Prussian Guards. Over 400 casualties were sustained on the first day. Come 11 July, the Welsh had partially taken the wood, and were relieved the following day by the 21st Division.

Aled Rhys Hughes’ Mametz is a fascinating collection of photographs. Beginning in 2009, Hughes visited Mametz Wood on or around 10 July for the next six years, in the hope of creating photographic studies that, as he notes in the book’s Foreword, ‘are a suitable commemoration of the men who took part and the land over which they fought.’ Underlying the project is David Jones’ long war poem In Parenthesis (1937). Jones fought at Mametz Wood with the 38th Division, and his poem, begun ten years after the end of the war, combines what Jeremy Hooker calls, in his illuminating essay that accompanies Hughes’ photographs, ‘the immediacy of terrible experience with a vision of ultimate meaning in the form of religious myth.’ It is in this light, Hooker argues, that the beauty of Hughes’ work emerges.

The photographs are arranged into sections entitled ‘Confrontation,’ ‘Places,’ ‘Shells,’ ‘Twilight,’ ‘The Wood,’ ‘Totems,’ ‘Crosses,’ ‘Flags,’ ‘Objects,’ and ‘Visitors.’ The photobook itself is a confrontation of sorts: through Hughes’ photographs, we as viewers confront the history of Mametz Wood. The opening photograph places us front and centre, approaching the trees as the 38th Division had done 100 years ago. The photograph is carefully framed: there is no sky to be seen, only the tall grass underfoot and the dark threshold of trees in the distance. If to us it is a foreboding scene, what must it have been like, Hughes asks, for those confronting the wood in the midst of battle?

Wandering among the trees, we see shells protruding from the earth like tree stumps. We see crosses tacked to the trees, and Welsh flags strung along their branches. In the ‘Twilight’ section we see very little at all: eerie shapes and silhouettes that, as Hughes writes in his Foreword, echo one part of Jones’ In Parenthesis: ‘[the] wood became only a darker shape uncertainly expressed. Your eyes begin to strain after escaping definitions.’ Hughes’ work places the viewer at the heart of the wood, while remaining sensitive to its history. To Hooker, Hughes ‘comes close to revealing the significance of Mametz Wood by acknowledging his distance from the events that made it famous.’

Echoes of ‘In Parenthesis’ recur throughout the photobook, and for this reason we should consider Mametz in the light of the relationship between poetry and photography. While Hughes’ photographs are not explicitly paired with extracts from Jones’ poem, the manner in which the poem informs the photographs draws our attention to how ideas of loss and memory, and themes of landscape and war, are represented in both art forms. An instructive photobook to read alongside this one is Robert Crawford and Norman McBeath’s Simonides (2011). The book pairs McBeath’s black-and-white photographs with Crawford’s translations of Simonides’ epitaphs into Scots, creating resonances between the visual and verbal representations of loss and remembrance.

Something similar occurs in Mametz. Perhaps the most startling aspect of it is Hughes’ decision to photograph in colour. This is not, it must be said, a departure for Hughes: his previous two photobooks, Môr Goleuni/Tir Tywyll (2004) and Rhyw Deid yn Dod Miwn (2008) are also in colour, as is much of his other work. Black-and-white photographs, while often more tonally evocative, tend to contain an overwhelming sense of pastness: look, for example, at Fay Godwin’s photographs in her collaboration with Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet (1979). While ‘remains’ was dropped from the title of the reissue Elmet (1994), Hughes’ poems implied some kind of regeneration and future that contrasted with the memorialising function of Godwin’s images. They were photographs of what was left, not what might be to come.

Mametz startles, then, when we consider the relationship between photography and war. A focus on the past was not, it seems, Hughes’ sole intention in Mametz: the project was not merely a means of looking backwards, but of reflecting on our processes of remembrance. Mametz Wood itself, while associated in the Welsh psyche with the battle, continues to exist: Hughes photographs the surrounding cornfields and the wood, regrown around the artillery shells that once bombarded it. Colour, in this context, affirms Hughes’ desire both to commemorate and regenerate. In photographing the colours and shades of Mametz Wood as it exists today, Hughes creates an evocative, insightful, and positive memorial.

Michael Nott is writing his PhD thesis on ‘A History of Photopoetry’ at St Andrews University. His essay on the field in Wales, ‘Slender Underpinnings: Welsh Photopoetry and the Collaborative Imagination’, is published by New Welsh Review, summer 2015.