Geoff Dyer: ‘A gas mask on a tree stopped me in my tracks – it shows the air itself can be toxic’

A memorial and a prophecy … A gas mask on a damaged tree on the road to Kreminna in Ukraine's Luhansk oblast.

"This photograph of a gas mask on a tree beside a track in Kreminna in Ukraine’s Luhansk oblast stopped me in my tracks. The original caption in the Guardian reads 'tree' but it looks like the remains of a tree, more like a planted post. Has the rest of it – the parts that make it a tree – been damaged by war? Whatever the explanation there is a hint, in the mottled pattern of the bark, of a giraffe’s neck, that vulnerable loneliness of the vertical amid the overwhelmingly horizontal. By a careful choice of angle the photographer has also imparted an animating slinkiness, a slightly feminine torsion, to the immobile wood. ..."

Guardian 

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