Between the Iconic and the Symbolic

This article examines the photographs of ruined East European and German cities which amateur photographer Boris Smirnov took in 1945 when he was sent to Germany to study the Nazis’ camouflage techniques. Cast in an aesthetically alert and self-consciously stylized idiom, his ruin photography presents a figurative expression of trauma, free of the requisite heroic inflections of Soviet representations of the war. His works reveal a suggestive emphasis on material form, which causes the viewers to ask what defines the experience of war and what it means to maintain aesthetic alertness amidst a landscape of ruins. Responding to the shock of the Leningrad Blockade and to the anaesthetization that the struggle to survive and to contribute to the collective war effort required, Smirnov identified with the expressiveness of the built environment. Redeeming the density of lived experience—bodily sensations, imagination, memory—he sought to enable a moment of self-absorption and to overcome the fragmentation and self-denial imposed by the war and, more broadly, by his country's totalitarian project

Aesthetics · Art · Battlefield · Expression (computer science · German · Photography · Visual arts · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory