The Tverskaya Girl

What makes this photograph a great success is the story in the picture well told by all the technical choices and the good timing of the artist's eye to find the image through the lens. The two prior critiques and this one combine in demonstrating that the result of the story is different in shades for each in its audience.

One of the men seems uncaring of his performance in his costume and just a regular guy; another holding on to the flag and genuinely frozen in formality except that there are flowers blooming from his lapel; the third stuffy, stiff and almost nothing other than his costume to define him. This trio represents the past without any doubt. There is no future in them at all. They are perfectly positioned behind and slightly out of focus - - just as the past would be - - but compositionally in the first position of the eye to the frame. So they set the stage.

In front we have a girl clearly put together by someone else. What twelve year old girl would want to dress in ill-fitting military drab with a perfunctory patriotic medal and a patriotic ribbon unless someone had told her, someone rooted in the past, that this costume would become her, would make her family proud, would elevate her in some fashion, would be a way to discharge some sort of social responsibility This is the look in her face. But just in case we are about to accept her acceptance, there is the lipstick and the careful arrangement of the hair as telltale signs that there is ambivalence to her role. And looking again at the cast of her eye, you can see the annoyance that all teenagers have towards all things adult. The annoyance that she gets no flowers?

The whole thing is preposterous and they all are made to seem so. What is it in our culture that makes us impose the past instead of using it as a lesson for corrections?