Minnie Potter
German Nazis built concrete bunkers up and down the west coasts of Norway and France during World War 2. These buttresses were known jointly as the Atlantic Wall, and it was this blockade that the Allies violated during the assault at Normandy. A lot of the Atlantic Wall and many other WWII bunkers still stand 70 years later—primarily due to them being “just incredibly difficult to get rid of,” commented the photographer Jonathan Andrew. According to him, people “tried blowing them up, but a lot of them are just too expensive to actually dismantle and take down,” He thinks the reasons are “So that’s why there’s still so many of them just left in fields so long after the war.”
.” Today, the bunkers are a bizarre but definitely a normal part of the scenery. Farmers stock up hay and animal feed in them, and pest about it when they have to cultivate around those areas. Juveniles have turned it into a place where they sneak away to smoke in and have adorned them with graffiti. Sometimes the bunkers, which are close to the sea or ocean, are used as platforms for diving- even though some were destroyed after a fatal diving accident.
The photographer was attracted to these sites due to the ethereal feel of them. He says he mainly wanted to put focus on the unusual geometric shapes of the forts and several buildings left behind from the wars. He said in amusement, “ [I’m] looking at them architecturally and also just as weird objects, as strange objects.
And maybe you can imagine them built by an alien species in the future and they’ve sort of gone to ruin—[that] kind of thing.” “If you take them out of context,” he says, “it’s like, ‘What are all these weird strange shapes? What are all these structures for?’”