Geoff Dyer: ‘A gas mask on a tree stopped me in my tracks – it shows the air itself can be toxic’
www.theguardian.com
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:48:33 +0300
A recent Guardian news story on the Russian use of poison gas in Ukraine featured an arresting photograph that spoke to me of the anonymity of warThis photograph of a gas mask on a tree beside a track in Kreminna in Ukraine’s Luhansk oblast stopped me in my tracks.The original caption in the Guardian reads “tree” but it looks like the remains of a tree, more like a planted post.
Has the rest of it – the parts that make it a tree – been damaged by war? Whatever the explanation there is a hint, in the mottled pattern of the bark, of a giraffe’s neck, that vulnerable loneliness of the vertical amid the overwhelmingly horizontal.
By a careful choice of angle the photographer has also imparted an animating slinkiness, a slightly feminine torsion, to the immobile wood.
That might be why it’s reminiscent of one of Peter Mitchell’s wonderful photographs of scarecrows in Yorkshire.
The one I have in mind is a rare example of what is obviously a woman plying this exposed and elemental trade, glamorously kitted out for a night – she is framed by darkness – on a nonexistent town.
Lifelike and haunted, she looks like a ghost of her former self.
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