Contemporary city photoshopped with war-scenes from history
Sergei Larenkov has photoshopped together modern images of St Petersburg with photos taken during the brutal Siege of Leningrad during WWII (at least, I think these are Leningrad, from the translations -- can someone more familiar with the city and the language confirm?). The results are stunning. I walk through East London every morning to get to work, and sometimes you can see the terrors of war superimposed on the modern landscape -- the sawn-off stubs of the iron railings that were harvested "for the war effort" (and dumped in the Channel without being turned into munitions after all), the single handsome old building stuck like an old tooth in the gleaming modern denture-work of sterile, post-War neubauten. But to see these ghost-photos is to see the invisible craters and hear the inaudible screams.
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I'm reminded of the augmented reality overlays in William Gibson's _Spook Country_. I can imagine GPS tech being developed by which one could see any piece of information related to a geographic location.
Fantastic find.
yep, it's st petersburg.
The title is something like 65 Years After the Blockade (Siege) of Leningrad. It's beautifully done. I was in St. Petersburg in 2001, and the last few pix look like the Hermitage.
I recently found an intarwebs treasure trove of old postcards taken in the small French town in which I live.
I'm absolutely fascinated by the ones taken during and after both of the world wars -- some are photos of devastation, others of things like the English army parading German POWs through town at the end of WWI, and one of my favorites, a jeep full of grinning GIs sitting in the main square just after the liberation -- and the buildings in the square look exactly as they do today.
It's definitely a "tie to the past" feeling when you see photos of the things that have happened in such familiar places.
Would be awesome to see the same treatment done with shots from places like Budapest or Prague just to see how much of the city was re built from total rubble.
I'd love to see that done to other cities like Berlin and London. Striking images.
Does anyone know what those big black balloons they were leading through the streets would have been?
Anyone know what those inflatable-hotdog-looking things were for?
Some kind of cover for people avoiding snipers?
Shimon Attie did this in the real world in the early 1990s, slide projections on walls in Berlin.
e.g.,
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A7648&page_number=2&template_id=1&sort_order=1
http://www.hbs.edu/schwartz/items/attieshimon24.html
http://www.woostercollective.com/2009/01/shit_were_diggin_the_slide_projections_o.html
Some farkers were discussing those balloon thingys, and the conclusion was that they are filled with gas to inflate barrage balloons with:
http://sovietrussia.co.uk/bringing-down-planes-with-balloons/
What a great idea, this needs to be a Flickr group.
The giant black hotdogs are suspended over the city with heavy cables making flying over the city very dangerous.
To #4 - Prague received little damage during WW2. I'm not certain about Budapest, but I don't recall seeing evidence of it there either.
Try Warsaw, Berlin (particularly the former East Berlin), and Dresden.
these should be posters put up in the locations where they are shot. talk about history coming alive! (and a reminder that peace is worth working for).
This is kind of how I feel sometimes when I'm visiting a major city in Europe, like the ghosts of the many centuries of war and horror are still silently calling out to anyone who might somehow hear. It's weirdly cool that someone would make a picture out of it.
This is somewhat reminiscent of Revisionist Photos:
http://www.revisionistphotos.com/
The sawn off stumps of fences is, at this point, sixty years later, the single most prevelant scar of world war two. i was just in the northwest not too long ago with my mum and you can go through miles of streets and find each and every house with the little stumps of wrought iron held in with melted lead and then one that still has them for no reason that I can tell.
It even reached - again randomly - into the graveyards where every now and again you'll find a grave that's had its little fence removed.
People in england love - or loved - their gardens, and the level of artistry in the fences was far and away more striking than any other part of the well nigh indistingushable row houses that they adorn.
I've been told that people didn't really have any choice in the matter either. Community groups (drunk youths with hacksaws and carts) would walk from house to house and just start sawing away, and I've heard stories of people crying when it happened.
I'm not trying to say that losing your fence compares to some of the other horrors of war, (like, oh, having a building dropped on your head) but it's interesting that through something as simple as that you can kind of still get something of the flavour of how the war affected the millions and millions of people who will never be featured in the history books.
Yes, this appeared on englishrussia.com recently with same story-- Leningrad then vs. Petersburg today.
I've heard persistent rumours that the iron from railings was not used, but I've never found any documentation showing this. Are we sure we aren't perpetuating an urban legend?
As they say, Citation Needed!
Google translate is your friend. (I tried the fish first, for street cred, but it coughed.)
- Egil
I didn't know that all the Shuttle External Tanks were produced in the Soviet Union during WW2.
These images made the hairs on my arms stand on end, especially the one of the modern man walking toward the bodies laying on the ground... They really make you see in a different light...
Wow, this is incredibly powerful.
Cory, your mentioning of sawn-off iron stumps reminds me of being in Budapest. I was visiting on business, and spent a week in an office building that was in a fairly industrial part of the city - lots of garages and small manufacturing operations. We'd walk to a small unmarked restaurant for lunch, and I remarked to my hosts about very old concrete or plaster walls that had lines of pock marks on them. Having worked on a number of World War II-themed games in my career, and seeing a lot of reference photos the artists used to create battle-scarred walls and buildings, I asked one of the Hungarians, "Is that what I think it is?" He nodded. I stopped in front of one wall, that was behind a very old concrete and iron fence. It had a rough line of pock marks that was clearly left by a strafing machine gun.
As an American, who grew up in California, having never witnessed much architecture older than my parents and certainly nothing war-damaged, I could scarcely wrap my head around both the notion of walking to lunch every day past a wounded building, and the fact that no one had bothered to repair it or cover it up. Even in the Castle District, there is a ruined building, with a wall wounded by bullet holes. I asked my host again why no one had torn it down, or covered it up. He told me that the city debated that subject for a while, and ultimately chose to leave it intact.
At the risk of editorializing here, America has its share of war memorials, and I have walked in some of the the fields where the Blue and the Grey spilled each others' blood, but nothing in my life prepared me for seeing such things.
Years later, in Leipzig, Germany, I also noticed that parts of that city still had bombed-out buildings and the same bullet-riddled walls I had seen in Budapest, echoes of a conflict I have only read about, having had the good fortune to be born into a place that did not have to bear the scars of war.
i LOVE stuff like this.
Boy, having Tears for Fears' depressing "Mad World" play over the radio as you see these shots brings you down a bit.
Living somewhere far removed from this sort of conflict it's not something I see regularly.
I was in St Petersburg this past September. One of the things that struck me over and over as I visited the various palaces, churches, and museums, were the photos of the devastation these places had suffered during in World War II. (There was always a corner or small display showing how things were before the war and how things were immediately after.) It was mindboggling to think of the amount of money the Soviet and Russian governments ended up spending to restore Peterhof, Pushkin, the Hermitage, St Isaac's, etc.
I was also haunted by the photos and mementos and music at the Siege of Leningrad monument (accompanied by heartbreaking music). Up to two million dead from starvation. A front line so close that Russian soldiers rode the tramway to engage the Nazis. So much lost, so much stolen, so much suffering.
Thank you for the link to these moving photos.
#18. I heard, years ago, that our railings were used as ballast for ships returning to their home ports. Stands to reason, no exports during war time. Apparently there are ports in West Africa whose houses sport attractive Victorian railings. I have yet to see any evidence of this though. Not that it's on a par with the Seige of Leningrad.
"dumped in the Channel without being turned into munitions after all"
[Citation Needed]
Though I do vaguely remember reading similar stuff elsewhere, I find it hard to believe that even poor-quality metals wouldn't have been stockpiled. I can imagine metal being dumped in places they wanted to make impassable to u-boats, though, and long twisted ribbons of fencing might be ideal for that. They might also use it for chaffing the water to make the magnetic ship detectors on mines ineffective. Just being dumped to hide them from the public, though, seems like an expensive and dangerous exercise for very little gain.