The Project

Bringing the War Home II aims to disrupt current understandings of war as ‘over there,’ time limited, and contained within overtly military spaces and practices. Instead, this project seeks to further collective understandings of the range of ideas, activities, logistics and therefore power needed to sustain military operations; to explore military homes, their living rooms, as spaces where the war is ‘brought home’.  In other words, whereas there has been extensive photography taken of the ‘front-lines’ of recent wars and its impacts, this research and the stories that will be told, are of a more complex and extensive set of relationships ‘at home’ that are necessary to support the ‘front line’: where war space and civilian space, war-time and non-war time are blurred.

Bringing the War II will therefore document the family and communal living spaces of UK military families — whether in private homes, ‘grace and favour’ homes, communal living spaces or the number of additional spaces that serve as living rooms. Through these spaces the private and the public, the permanent and the transient, the social and political play out in the everyday: military living made mutually possible by ‘civilian’ lives in the care work that goes on behind the scene, the memorialisation and the exclusions that champion certain stories and histories over others, the boundary work in navigating security and insecurity, what is military and what is civilian. These ‘living rooms’ are rich with stories and we want to help share them.

To tell the story of the complex and compelling social and political work that plays out in military living rooms, the Bringing the War Home II team work with families to develop a photo-series around living rooms in three ways, bringing together:

  • an original photograph series documenting these living rooms;
  • testimonials from current and former military families on their living spaces, their stories and what these spaces have meant to them;
  • a public archive of family photographs of these living spaces.

To sign up to participate in the project in any of these 3 ways, please follow the steps to complete the consent form here.  If you would like to view more information about the project, please read the information sheet here.