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 war

This 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.