New Photos

I posted some new photos in the Flickr sidebar (after finally discovering a way to get them through my dial-up connection). The bottom three are a series of Lenins. You know me and my Lenins. Can't get enough. But these are more layered than the usual statuary shots, as they're set against a carnival that has been set up on Svobody Square for far longer than I care to remember -- it is Europe's biggest square, I'm now convinced, and I'd like to see the clean spatial scope of it, an unbroken horizon of bricks and agoraphobia, some damn pigeons scattering you know? But instead it's bumper cars and don't-puke-on-me rides. But apparently you shouldn't get me started.

The other shots are from Norway, where I recently went to see to a family affair. The second shot was taken from inside my mother's boathouse, just down from my mother's cabin; the next is one of several photos I'll be posting from my visit to the Blood Road Museum, which is located in Rognan, where my mother was born and raised. The museum is dedicated to the Russian prisoners who were used as slave laborers by the Nazis. In four years, Hitler wanted to construct a railroad through North Norway and on up to Kirkennes, so he might be better prepared to attack the Soviet Union from the North, near Murmansk. The railroad didn't materialize (it reached just shy of my mother's town, above the Arctic Circle) but thousands of prisoners still lost their lives to the effort.