infoThis Man’s Army by Martin Figura
Saturday 14 August 1999 to Sunday 10 October 1999
The army invented bull to take the squaddies' minds off all the tedium of peacetime... Billy Bragg
Martin Figura joined the British army in 1972 at the age of 15. Slowly at first, he rose through the ranks. He was commissioned at the age of 31 and retired in 1998. The photographs in this unique insider's view of army life were taken between 1992 and 1996.
I made the work not as a polemic or as an exercise in public relations for the Army, but to try to explain to myself what it was that I was part of. I am by nature untidy and disorganised and was always bemused by the very ordered nature of the Army and its need to formalise.
From schools and careers officers, recruitment and tours of duty in Hong Kong, the Falklands and Northern Ireland, the exhibition takes us through to retired soldiers at a Combat Stress Residential Care Home. Figura's portraits explore class and identity, family and social order within the closely defined (at times claustrophobic) contexts of Army life. The Left has often found imaginative engagement with the military to be difficult. In Figura's time, The British Army has, nevertheless, gone through radical changes, even though, as Anthony Beevor writes in an accompanying essay, As late as 1988 and 1989, many senior officers were still arguing that it was the duty of the armed forces to remain half a generation behind civilian society.
The conflict between change and tradition runs through these images. Aware of the photographer, the subjects tell us as much in their frequently deliberate self-presentation as Figura does in the wit of his use of location.
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