Smolensk Cemetery, Leningrad 1987

This photograph of Smolensk Cemetery was captured by Boris Smelov, sometime before his death in 1998. The palette is almost entirely monochrome, but somehow it speaks of memory and loss, of winter, of bare trees, of graveyards near buildings. I sympathize with Smelov, I imagine what it might have been like to find this scene. He might have been thinking about life, death, and about the way we make our mark in the world. This image resonates with the work of other photographers, like Eugène Atget, who documented the streets of Paris with a similar eye for the everyday and the melancholic. Look at the way the branches claw and reach towards the sky. Smelov's photograph reminds us that artists are in an ongoing conversation, inspiring one another’s creativity across time. What could it have been like to be in that place, to feel the ground under your feet, to see the etched text, to feel the cold? Photography is its own kind of embodied expression, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty.