If you’ve read my blog for a long time you will have seen this image I love, which I took in Berlin a few years before Covid. I found it bleakly resonant for all sorts of reasons I’m unwilling to write about directly on the blog, but it’s fair to say it’s an image which is written into the fabric of my psyche:
Which makes it unsettling to discover that the blood stains of the birds, as if they’ve been shot on sight by an unnamed marksman, were added later (presumably by the person who has signed at the crotch of the hooded figure…).This is the (brilliant) Don John’s original image, which has a completely different valance to the one I encountered in Mehringplatz. Much less bleak, right?
I’m unsure what to feel about this. There’s a literal and figurative violence to the way the original image was modified, but discovering this modification at a point in my life where the original bleakness no longer resonates feels appropriate. There’s a journey to my engagement with the image made possibly by the defacement, taking on a deeper meaning as a consequence than would have been possible with either of them alone.
Mark Carrigan 