Wartime photographers images show 'pivotal moment in history'
Images captured during the final months of World War Two in Europe have gone on display on the Isle of Man for the first time.The exhibition of Manx-born photographer Leonard McCombe's work was put together to coincide with the 80th anniversary of VE Day.The photographs on display at the House of Manannan in Peel show glimpses of some of the key events in Normany, Berlin and London in the months around the end of the conflict in Europe.Social history curator for Manx National Heritage Matthew Richardson said the images provided a "fantastic documentary record of this pivotal moment in the history of Europe".
Born in 1923, McCombe spent his childhood in Port Erin in the south of the island and took up photography as an early age.He was commissioned to capture the alien internees held in the island's only all-female internment camp at Rushen following the outbreak of war, and went on to travel through Europe working as a photojournalist.Following the end of the war he moved to the United States, where he spent many years continuing to work as a photographer for Life Magazine.He left the profession to focus on the family farm after the publication closed.
The display, which is running in parallel to an exhibition at Heidelberg University, has been put together with McCombe's family, and coincides with a stamp issue featuring five decades of his photography.Clark McCombe said seeing the his father's wartime work on display "gives me goosebumps, literally"."There's this chaos of war and he's there with a camera, and he's 21 years old. You start to put all that together and you realise, while he's daddy, I should have known he was much more than I thought he was at 12 or especially 15 or 16 years old."I can't image what he went through, what that generation went through," he added.
Mr Richardson said McCombe had been "in the right place at the right time" during the final months of the conflict."He was on the Normandy battlefields, he was in Paris as the city was liberated, and he was in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of VE Day, and he just had such an eye for capturing an image," he said.Mr Richardson added: "This is an exhibition that really brings it home to people what the real consequences of the fighting in Europe were."By the time the dust settled in 1945 several European capitals had been reduced almost to rubble, and this exhibition shows in human terms what that means, what the consequences were for those people who'd lost their homes, lost everything."The exhibition will be on display until 05 October.
Read more stories from the Isle of Man on the BBC, watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer and follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook and X.
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