French Army soldier in cantonment near Akkerman (today Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyï in Ukraine) towards the end of the Great War 1914-1918

In this collection of photographs taken by French soldiers on the eastern front during World War I – over one hundred years ago – high resolution scans have revealed in stunning detail, not only the film’s grain structure, but also a rich patina of scratches and chemical alterations. On certain occasions, the intimate history of the negative itself and the successive layers of the passage of time confer to the work a unique level of abstract artistic beauty.