Artillery observation officer in forward post regulates our barrage during the advance on Woncourt 1914 - 1918

This is an image made by Realistic Travels, showing an artillery observation officer. Looking at it now, I feel like it’s not so realistic. More like a theater set. There’s something performative about it. The values of the image make it hard to read, and the subject blends in with its environment, mimicking the landscape and becoming just another contour in the earth. The soldiers in the foreground are dark, almost silhouetted, and the forms are soft and blurry, so there is no focal point. The figures become flattened, making the image more about surface than depth. There’s a weirdly seductive quality to the scene. It could be a metaphor for painting itself, where forms emerge from chaos and ambiguity, where observation transforms into something new, something abstract. Like a Cy Twombly painting, where we can only see the barest, most ghostly outlines of a lost civilization.