International Women’s Day 2022

Just a short one for once … Today is 8 March, Women’s Day. And this has to be marked in some way.

Last year on this date I gave you a post featuring various more or less gigantic female statues.

One of them was the humongous titanium-clad Rodina Mat (aka Motherland Monument) in Kyiv, featured in the photo above. The statue is a staggering 62m tall (with the sword), combined with the plinth she towers over the city at a height of over a 100m.

The photo was taken when I was in the city prior to my second Chernobyl trip in May 2015. Also on that occasion I took a photo whose composition now seems strikingly evocative:

Rodina Mat against big guns

This was of course only a play with perspective. The WWII-era guns in the foreground were of a perfectly regular size and formed part of the larger war memorial complex around the giant statue. But from this perspective she looks a) small, and b) threatened.

Suddenly that has taken on a fitting symbolism for the current situation in Putin’s war against Ukraine … and I wonder if this Rodina Mat will actually be physically threatened at some point as this nasty conflict drags on …

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5 Years Anniversary & a New Poll

Today it’s the fifth anniversary of this Blog, i.e. five years to the day since the very first post appeared here. To mark this occasion, I’ve selected five of my favourite photos ever to have featured on the Blog (and made sure none of those featured in the Blog post on the first anniversary four years ago are repeated). For the new poll, scroll to the bottom …

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As before, I give you a quick photo essay Blog Post based mostly on photos taken with a

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