Washing, Kursk 1984

This gelatin silver print was made by Gennadi Bodrov, who lived from 1957 to 1999, and it looks like he lived a life behind the iron curtain. The scene, bathed in a melancholic black and white, shows someone holding up a large white cloth to dry. It hides the person. The cloth is monumental in scale. It could almost be a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a symbol of loneliness. You can see that the artist has caught a lucky gust of wind. I wonder, what was it like to be Bodrov, taking this photo? What was he thinking? Was he trying to escape the dullness of everyday life in Kursk? Or to find a way of capturing a poignant moment of the everyday? It reminds me of other artists such as Boris Mikhailov. All artists, in the end, are in conversation with each other, across time and place.