We were commissioned to produce a work celebrating the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Our idea was to associate this event with the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. We went to the Photography Archive of the Imperial War Museum in London, looking for photographs taken during the Second World War by aviators, while they carried out night bombing raids over Europe. In the archive was a box of prints to be sold off because they were faulty, damaged or unclassifiable. We bought this photograph of an aviator, and blurred his face.

Although the original print was probably made during the war, there was nothing written on the back. And the image held no hard information as to where or when it was taken, though a military historian might have been able to draw some general inferences from the uniform, equipment and aircraft. The photograph seems to have been staged, perhaps for propaganda purposes, and shows the airman apparently about to depart.