MANHATTAN – Back here. A flowering tree on East 91st Street, doing what it does every April whether anyone is watching or not. After two weeks of Pompeii, Vesuvius, and Bourbon palaces,I’m happy to be back.
Day 6,024 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
Looking back 17 years to a World War II memorial outside of Moscow. Here is Claude’s answer when I asked Claude to identify the place and critique the photo:
This is almost certainly the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Moscow on the Leningrad Highway (Leningradskoe shosse), near Khimki, northwest of the Moscow city center. The monument marks roughly the closest point of the German advance on Moscow during Operation Typhoon in late 1941 — one of the most consequential stops in the entire war. The obelisk and paired figures are characteristic of Soviet memorial grammar: the soldier and the factory worker, united in defense, a visual argument for the fusion of military and civilian sacrifice.
The image works on several levels. The obelisk is cropped at the left edge and top frame, which refuses the monument its conventional grandeur — you feel the mass without being handed the whole thing. The two figures are silhouetted against a featureless sky, which strips them of ideology and returns them to something more elemental: two people standing together against a bad sky. The wet granite and the empty boulevard in a gray April light make the place feel genuinely abandoned rather than reverently preserved — which is its own kind of truth about how these sites age.
195 days before the start of my one photograph every day project.
