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Robert van der Sanden


Free Account, Hooge Mierde

Look into the future

I took this picture in Leuk (Susten), Switserland. There were 50,000 skulls stacked up against the walls inside a small church. The skulls completely cover the wall, which is nearly 20 metres long and three metres high – and the pile is about two and a half metres deep. Every cubic metre contains about 400 skulls.

They were found, hidden behind a series of false walls, in the restauration of the chapel in 1983. Nobody knows exactly how they came there. They could have been dug up from the local cemetry but there is also a theory that they could be the skulls from the soldiers killed in the Battle of Pfyn in 1798, when the German-speaking communities of the Valais fought against the French.

I desaturated the color of the background to get the focus to the boy. The colors in the picture were not so good anyway.

Canon AV-1, 28mm, sidelighting through the church door

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