IWM AGAIN

It’s true that whenever I know that I’m going to be in the vicinity of the Lowry Centre, I always take one of the cameras along, because I always find the architecture of that area particularly stimulating.

The ridiculous thing is that I always end up taking pretty much the same pictures, each and every time, another set of pictures of the same old views which serve little purpose other than to fill up even more space on the hard drive.

For some reason it’s always bloody freezing whenever we go there too, but I suppose we ought to ask ourselves whether we’re going there because it’s a cold day anyway, and we couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

Actually, we went to that part of Salford because we wanted to go to the Imperial War Museum. We’d heard about the new display of Sean Smith photographs which we quite fancied seeing, but, while we were there, we also got drawn in by the fascinating exhibition called “Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict” which, in amongst all the other images and ideas on display, mostly made me think of my dad serving as a medic in Burma, and all of the horrors he had to endure about which I never really knew anything.

Mind you, it also made me think of “M*A*S*H” which just goes to show how fickle and shallow I am.

And that bloke with half a face in “Boardwalk Empire…”

Still, despite my obvious ease at being drawn into pop-culture references whenever I’m faced with anything that’s too “real world” for me to cope with, it’s a bloody good, and rather moving, exhibition and is on until the end of August, and is well worth a look if you get the chance to go.

The Sean Smith pictures (in the gallery heading into the cafeteria) are pretty fantastic, too, by the way, which is just as well, seeing as that’s what we really went there to see.

Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, there was a group of French schoolchildren milling about the place on the day we went, which struck me as kind of weird.

Not the fact that you’d want to take a load of schoolkids to a museum, because that’s not odd at all, but I did wonder what they made of it all, because it is all seem from a terribly “British” point of view on the whole, especially when you make it to the gift shop, which must have seemed a little bit surreal to young and French eyes.

Of course the gift shop itself remains a necessary evil for any of these places to keep themselves afloat, but I can’t help feeling slightly bothered by the idea of turning the horrors of war and conflict into nick-nacks and souvenirs. Somehow it feels just “wrong” of us to be turning all that suffering into plastic toys and embossed notebooks because, despite the fact that it helps us not to forget, it does seem to trivialise it all a little, which is what we really ought never to do.