The Town From the Ridge

From the ridge, Engilchek explains itself in one frame: a town gridded onto a barren valley floor at the foot of enormous mountains, built in Soviet decades for tin that stopped mattering, and left mid-sentence. I set up the D5 on the tripod and worked the scene slowly, the way you photograph something that will not move and cannot heal.

The grid is the poignant part. Streets at right angles, laid out for a future of buses and shift changes, holding now a handful of households and the wind. Planning is a form of optimism; the ruins of planning are that optimism in the past tense.

I stayed on the ridge until the light went flat, then drove down into the streets I had just photographed, which is always a strange transition, like entering your own map. The town from inside is tomorrow's post. It earned two.