The Crying Women of Kiev.

It seems to be a real photo and it is incredible how it manages a perfect composition of foreground and background: the crying women in the foreground, more worried faces in the background, and, farther away, burning buildings -- destroyed during the battle for Kiev, in 1941.

It looks eerily similar to some Renaissance paintings, like this one, by an unknown Lombard painter, showing Mary, mother of Jesus, and the pious women around her, crying.

Much art is about suffering -- and many masterpieces show it. But it is not suffering in itself that makes a masterpiece -- it is the feeling about suffering. I have been thinking on this point, and I believe I can cite John Gardner in his "The Art of Fiction" - it is about literature but it is more general than that. So, here is what Gardner says:

Nothing in the world is inherently interesting -- that is, immediately interesting, and interesting in the same degree, to all human beings. [..] by the nature of our mortality we care about what we know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike what threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has no visible bearing on our safety or the safety of the people and things we love. [..] Since all human being have the same root experience (we're born, we suffer, we die, to put it grimly), so that all we need for our symphaty to be roused is that the writer commincate with power and convinction the similarity in his character's experience and our own. 

And so is the secret of so much art - be it writing, painting, or photographing. It is all about sharing an experience. And suffering is something we all experience. So, the crying women of Kiev are us, and the bell tolls for them and for us at the same time.


(another piece of mine about Ukraine)