Capture of a Hun blockhouse in the Hindenburg Line at Croiselles, wrecked by our artillery preparation after 1916

This stereoscopic image, made by Realistic Travels, captures the aftermath of artillery fire on a Hun blockhouse. The approach here is documentary, but there's something unreal about the duplication of the scene. It's like a photograph, but doubled, inviting a kind of visual stutter. The grayscale palette reinforces the bleakness. Look at the smoke—it's suspended, frozen in time, almost like a ghostly presence. The texture of the earth, the rough-hewn construction of the blockhouse, all rendered in shades of gray, create a palpable sense of destruction. The photograph is like a sketch, or an unfinished painting, inviting the viewer to fill in the emotional details. I am reminded of Gerhard Richter's blurry, gray paintings of war, which use a similar palette and soft focus to evoke the trauma of violence, suggesting that war is a kind of hallucination. Ultimately, art, like war, is an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.