“I was just taking to suit myself”: Jack Turner’s Photographic Life from Western Prince Edward Island to the Western Front

Abstract

Photography is a technological engagement with the act of seeing, and its presumed “authenticity” through technological reproducibility was both valued and feared by the Canadian government. A gunner from O’Leary Prince Edward Island named Brenton Harold “Jack” Turner defied censorship regulations to document his war. From 1915-1919, Turner bore unflinching photographic witness to both the horrors of modern warfare and the necessity of community, without which his clandestine photographs would not exist. The war changed his relationship with photography, and he did not pick up a camera for decades afterwards; perhaps he only saw a landscape he may have felt partially responsible for destroying. Eventually, Turner returned to his wartime images, processing those harrowing experiences into “memory objects.” In inspiring empathy for the individual soldier-photographer reflecting on his experiences, Turner's reflective pieces challenge the national imaginary of the Great War by bearing material witness to the personal trauma of warfare.