War (photographic print)

by Lee Karen Stow :: You need to be a member to contact artists →Join :: Portfolio

Poppies: Women and War - my major touring photographic exhibition - is inspired by the forgotten fact that an American woman, Moina Belle Michael, conceived of the hugely symbolic red poppy flower as a symbol of Remembrance almost a century ago.

I was astonished, not by the fact that she was a woman, but because each November Moina is forgotten. As is French woman Madame Anna Guérin, who introduced the red poppy symbol to the (Royal) British Legion in England in 1921.

Poppies: Women and War combines photographic portraits of forgotten women of war, and peace, with botanical photographic images of the common cornflower poppy growing in its natural environment.

The portraits are of women I meet, in my work as a photojournalist. Women from WWI (anecdotal) to women of WWII, Holocaust survivors, hibakusha of Hiroshima and recent conflicts: Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Also women peace campaigners, from the Cold War and Greenham Common and current nuclear weapons protests.

I use the poppy as a metaphor for women affected by war because, despite its delicate appearance,
the poppy grows and survives where everything else has been destroyed. It generates new life when
its seed, often dormant for years, is exposed to light following great upheaval.

I photograph other colours of the poppy family - orange, yellow, pink, blue, black and burgundy - to
represent women worldwide, of all nationalities and faiths, caught up in conflict. Also the white
poppy, growing wild and immortalised in silk, by women, as a symbol of peace.

The project received Arts Council funding from 2012 to 2014 and launched at the University of
Cambridge. It ran at the Museum of Liverpool from July 2015 to June 2016. Twenty images appeared at the UN Headquarters in New York.