The Reality Behind the Image: Red Square, Moscow

By danwgoodman on March 31, 2013 • ( 10 Comments )

The Reality Behind the Image

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Red Square, Moscow

A picture stops the world in its place. It freezes a fraction of a second for eternity. And while our minds stumble with the passing of time, a picture persists. Yet its value is often overlooked and barely analyzed. The power of an image is only as strong as the attention and imagination of the viewer. We too often mistake a historical image for something less than the present reality. The more distant a realist medium is to our concept of the real, the less entirely we feel and comprehend that representation. We therefore must embrace the image and extrapolate.

Take for instance this painting entitled Red Square by Fyodor Yakovlevich Alexeev. Created in 1801, one can immediately sense the artist’s attempt at realism. Although slightly different from today’s Red Square, the depiction is still, however distantly, familiar. We must delve into this scene, and ignore the paintings edges. The sky must continue higher and encircle our heads. The painting is a doorway to step through as we recreate reality around us. The recognizable St. Basil’s Cathedral locates us in the Russian city center. The sun sits low in the sky. St. Basil’s Cathedral stands at the southeastern end of Red Square, so it must be early in the day. The illuminated lush vegetation on the righthand building signals the summer months as the cool morning warms. Stands of a sprawled open marketline the edge of the square as horses and a trolley move through the dusty center. Orthodox Churches dominate the skyline of an earlier but still bustling Russian city almost as old as the sect itself. The poorer classes surround the markets while carriages of wealthy nobles ride by. One can certainly embrace this old Moscow’s Red Square, but the imagination must move beyond the painting’s brushstrokes and reconstruct a real environment to fill in the details. That which is depicted is also determined by the artist, Alexeev, and although our imaginations may make us nearly feel the summer evening warmth and hear the clicking of horses hooves on the packed dirt square, the artist directs our sensations. We can easily grasp the idea of the depiction, but to sense its reality in the past as powerfully as we can sense the present remains difficult. Often only the most simplistic and ordinary details of our dreams deceive us into believing their reality. The texture of the brick buildings, the brisk morning air and its chilly shade, the fur of glistening horses in the pale yellow light, all require our imaginations to construct.

Just over a decade after this painting debuted, the first photographic camera starts recording the world. The art of capture begins to expand beyond the painter but still remains limited to the elite. Rare and expensive box cameras persist for over a century. Refinements are frequent, as is the development of more modern film. By the turn of the 20^th century, the world Alexeev knew and painted so well has disappeared forever. Industrialization takes the western world by storm, dragging Russia along and into the future. Yet this future appears dark, violent, and mechanized.

It is in this new era, in 1917 that we suddenly find ourselves again.

This image draws us back to Red Square, but this time we face north. Film photography has allowed us to gain some of those convincing details, but we have lost the color. Immediately our eyes see something foreign. Real, but only in concept, this lack of tone plays upon our judgments. Believing this scene’s existence and feeling its existence require two dramatically different elements of the mind. Yet amid this spectrum of grey on a hazy day in Moscow, subtle details draw our emotions into feeling the past. Columns of Bolshevik forces parade around the fringes of the city center. We can imagine the soldiers in the foreground marching towards St. Basil’s Cathedral behind us, in the same direction as Alexeev’s scattered market long gone. Look at their faces. Their faces provide portals to the past. They connect us with our common humanity over the gap of time that we perceive separating us. The young soldier in the bottom right corner looks curiously at the camera. In fact, many of them have followed his gaze and stare at the strange and novel contraption. They see a large, extendable box with a built in lens atop a wooden tripod. They likely feel they are only looking at a photographer and his machine, but through that machine, separated by ninety-three years, we are looking back at them. They feel and sense the world of 1917 as powerfully as we sense our own present. Their joys and heartbreaks are as real as our own.

Early automobiles role by where horse-drawn carriages once trundled, escorting this troubled generation of sufferers. A country literally entrenched in Europe’s Great War for four long years now finds itself immersed in civil strife. A century of industry bodes diabolically for the battlefield. Metal behemoths with swiveling machine guns and towering smoke stacks replaces the wooden ships with rows of immobile cannons and tall masts. A cavalry of tanks and scattered airplanes replaces a cavalry of horses. The green haze of poison gas replaces the early morning mist. The twentieth century lays ripe for experimentation, horror, and progress as the Russian people overthrow a monarchy centuries old for something new, intriguing, and perhaps utopian. They fight for their children’s futures, which we find in our next image.

A Similar scene greets our eyes, only this time in snow. Here are the children. They march past St. Basil’s Cathedral toward war as their fathers did. Nearly a quarter century has past, and yet the Russian people find themselves again in hell. Their parents destroyed the Romanovs only for their children to inherit Stalin. We find ourselves in 1941, and only a few if any of the hundreds in this photograph will survive the next four years. And yet, they fight as their fathers did for their children’s futures. We do not have faces to transport us this time. Only bodies. So many bodies. The sun begins to set on this frigid evening amid a war of faster planes, bigger bombs, and a growing holocaust. An apocalypse seems inevitable, but the greatest weapons have yet to explode upon the world. These are concerns left still for their children to bear.

Seventeen years later, we find those concerns rolling over the same cobblestones. After the loss of millions and the destruction of much of the Motherland, Soviet Russia continues boiling in turmoil. Those who managed to survive the war enjoyed a short-lived and lonely victory in 1945. Peace again faltered to stand in the face of nuclear armament. Here, crowds returned to gather in Red Square for another military parade. This time, missiles replace soldiers. The knocking of Nazis at the gates of Leningrad has ceased but now an even more terrifying and surreal fear penetrates the people of communist Russia. Total annihilation by their former ally, the United States. The hopes of their grandparents to change and pacify the country and even the world were embodied in their leader, Lenin. Now his face mockingly dominates a scene of utmost foreboding. Halfway across the world, missiles like these stand ready in Cuba and point at Kennedy’s coast, only ninety miles away. Again, apocalypse seems inevitable. No wonder church towers still dominate the skyline of Moscow. Even through these darkest of days, life continues. Faith persists.

Today I find myself in the center of Red Square. The year is 2010. St. Basil’s dominates my view. Alexeev painted it just right. The sun floats above a pale, hazy sky as it did the day those Bolshevik soldiers marched. Yet today is so vastly different. Tragedy may lie in the history beneath my feet, but at least for now Red Square appears at peace. Only decades ago, my presence here would bring me incarceration or death. But today I stand in the epicenter of Moscow without fear. No need to look over my shoulder. I am an American student with a camera. I thought I would capture Russia, but Russia has captured me. Colors burst. My imagination suddenly seems so limited when I try to embrace the images of the past and make them as real as this is now. I can feel the bumpy and uneven cobbled stones beneath my feet. I can feel the warmth of the northern sun as I step out from the shadow of the Kremlin. This peace may only provide the illusion of permanence, but I cannot help but think the fears of Armageddon have finally passed. The deaths of millions of Russians are only wasted if we fail to embrace with gratitude the opportunities available to us today. I am an American and Russians surround me, and there is no fear. We can be brothers. Perhaps those millions suffered and died for that.

The borders have opened and now the world can penetrate this corner of the earth. With this freedom must come a conscientious awareness of a tragically brutal history intertwined with a vast cultural richness. We must remember and retain this city’s origins, for now could soon be a lost past. This time ought not to be a brief glimpse of a Russia before globalization forever alters it, but the early beginnings of a cultural discovering by the West. With more imaging technology at my fingertips than those only a decade ago could have ever imagined, I can show the world the Russia I feel just as Alexeev did; but unlike Alexeev, I can also supply the details.

Photography began as an attempt at realism. Yet reality is more than just an image. It impacts us. It makes us feel. In the face of reality we find so much more than a glimpse. The realism of the future must enhance our sight in order to touch us with the same brute force as does the real of our present. The realism of the future must be more than a process of capture. It must be an art like the realism of the past, for reality is the greatest art of all. The preservation of this place and this culture may rely on the capturing of its beauty in all of its artistic reality. The world must feel what it possesses with its eyes, before the world blindly changes it.

 

Works Cited

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