The angel of history

Title: "RUSSIA. Moscow. 1995. RUSSIA. Moscow. 1995. On the river Yauza" 

Photographer: Gueorgui Pinkhassov.

Photo ID: PAR124105.jpg

Magnum Photos, Artstor.

I think the photographer could have titled this photograph "War and Peace" without Tolstoy rolling over in his grave. Even though it ostensibly depicts the bucolic magic hour of dawn or twilight, it is heavy with symbolism, something the Russians do about as well as any culture on earth. The image quality is very painterly, adding an art historical level to an already heady image. The image is highly aestheticized: we can experience pure visual pleasure at the same time as we read--or rather, experience--the heaviness of history, a message we may experience more affectively than intellectually. But it is there. The forced perspective inducts the railing as a geometric curve, which, for this viewer, symbolizes history. The curved railing which divides the frame inexorably leads us between past and present. In the background we see evidence of industry, but also a landscape akin to that of war and disaster.While it might seem logical to read the background as the past, and the bird, the present, I think the message is more complicated than that. Despite the sepia melancholy tone of the photograph, I do not think this is about nostalgia. The best analogy I know of for an image such as this is Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History." Writing about a Paul Klee painting entitled "Angelus Novus," Benjamin describes the angel of history as hurtling forward with its face turned toward the past. Just to clarify: in this photograph I interpret the bird with its wings spread as that angel. And what we see in the background is the future. 

"Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 257-8.