Abstract
Devoted to the photography of the places where the fighting of the First World War took place, this contribution examines the memorial significance of the aesthetic choices. Photographic traces of the physical traces left by conflicts in space, photographic representation must be questioned insofar as it has a collective meaning: aspiring to take over the public space, the images also have a performativity of their own and thus influence reality. After examining the notion of trace as a meeting point between photography and its object, and then the collective dimension of photographic representation, we will look at the work of Michael St Maur Sheil, Guillaume Amat and Paola de Pietri, three photographers who seek to express the need for resistance to oblivion through the photography of conflict sites.