Log Book

During a visit to the Polish city of Szczecin in 2014, once the German port of Stettin, Mike Chick was reminded of his father’s World War II pilot’s log book. He was a British R.A.F. Pathfinder pilot in Bomber Command between April 1943 and January 1944, completing 48 missions to 26 cities in Germany and occupied Europe.

The artist, who has a German mother and lives in Berlin, visited all the cities listed in the original log book between 2017 and 2019, making night time photographs, as the original flights were made at night, as close to the original dates as possible. The work was informed by research conducted at the National Archives in London, as well as by an original photograph taken over Nuremberg in 1943 by his father’s aircraft. The resulting images show urban landscapes in the quiet of night, some industrial, some residential, all without people. Imbued with a certain mystery and foreboding, the work is a response to being in those spaces at that time, an extended reflection on this part of his father’s life and the corresponding period of European history.

It was originally exhibited at the Haus am Kleistpark in Berlin and later at the Positions art fair in 2020, and was published as a special limited edition in July of that year.

Numbered Limited Edition of 38 + 14 AP
Printed and bound in Berlin, Germany, 2020