Snow story...

I was woken up by rain. It was dropping to my face and I tried not to wake up. After some time I surrender and went to get some coverage for our faces to be able to felt a sleep again. 

Somebody called me from the balcony and I came out. Instead of balcony there was a road covered with wonderful shine - creaking snow. Some happy strangers in warm clothes passed by. Near my window was standing my young and beautiful mother and smiling to me. I was naked and felt nice frost by my skin but I was not frozen. I cam to her and breath with warm air on my frozen window to melt ice and to look inside. Inside was a fir-tree covered by snow. That's surprised me. I expected to see rain...

Afterwards my mother showed me old black and white photos of my childhood which I never had. On these pictures I saw mother looks like she never looks. My beloved uncle, looks like I never saw him before. Myself, little girl with toys which I never played. I looked on the flat of my childhood where I never lived. To the street in the window, belongs to the city and country which I never knew before. But all this knowledge was so native to me that after I waked up and looked to the clean Moscow sunrise I was not able to realize which of the past is more real...

And after was a flash of understanding. And everything became clear and simple. And I realized that there are no accidents in my life - everything is consistent and necessary. And I need everybody whom I meet as well as they need me. And for a second I felt myself endless solid in all my eternity multidimensionality. And it was wonderful...

Sweet Dreams for you...

International Holocaust Remembrance Day*

LEST WE FORGET

^{"Es fangt genauso an", sagt der alte Franz,}

^{"es is das gleiche Lied, es is derselbe Tanz.}

^{Es fangt genauso an, wie vor sechzig Jahr'}

^{Und es war'n damals auch am Anfang nur a paar."**}

71 years ago, on January 27, 1945, soldiers of the Soviet First Ukrainian Front fought their way to the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They found just under 6,000 prisoners still alive in the camp...

Auschwitz was the paradigm for the Nazi concentration camps. The estimated number (based on German data) of people killed in Auschwitz is about 1.5 million, including 1.35 million Jews and 90,000 Poles.

Some years ago, in 2008, I went (by train) to Auschwitz. I had only a small digital camera with me. But I was (mentaly) not able to take many pictures anyway. To many ghosts of the past...

Annihilated...

* The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the victims of Holocaust. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jews, 2 million Roma, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It was designated by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005.

** The chorus of a song by the Austrian group STS from 1992. The song is from a time when in Germany (and Austria) homes for asylum seekers where burned down. Something what is happening now again...

Roughly translated: 

"It begins just as back then," says the old Franz,

^{„it is the same song, it is the same dance.}

^{It begins exactly as sixty years ago '}

^{And then at the beginning there where also only a few. "}

ICONS

One can still find them everywhere in Russia: Statues and busts of Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin, the man whose ideas formed a whole century. Today is the 92th anniversary of his death.

A WALK IN THE PARK

Vienna, Schoenbrunn Palace Park

Into the Maze

Shelter

Growing

REDISCOVERED II

Finally it was snowing...

Landscape, Untitled #4 

Landscape (detail), Untitled #5 

Landscape, Untitled #6

REDISCOVERED

On the first day of the new year I somehow rediscovered how much fun landscape photography could be...

Landscape, Untitled #1

Landscape, Untitled #2

Landscape, Untitled #3

HALLO, GOOD BYE

2015 - The Last Sunset of the Year

  So it's a new year. As usually no New Year's resolutions from my side. Just hoping to make some pictures about which somebody feel the same like one visitor of my exhibition in Bagni di Lucca this summer, who wrote in the guestbook:

Il messaggio di ogni opera arrivo direttamente agli occhi al cuore.

[The message of the work is going directly from the eyes to the heart]

If I could achieve this with some of my pictures this year too I already would be very glad...

Happy New Year to everybody.