John Peter Askew, Bird and Towels 2008

With an essay by Elena Zaytseva

This bird shouldn’t be here. There is no business for a bird to be indoors, sitting on a window frame that opens inwards. And yet this little bird - a swallow? a finch? - a tiny silhouette against the blue sky - the blue of the sky is far too beautiful to look real, with its dramatic clouds and deep rich shades of blue - this bird is so in place here. It is a centre of gravity and the nail that holds the whole picture together - the small sharp silhouette over the lush blurred scarlet, pink and orange of the washing in the foreground. Like many other photographs by Askew this picture melts together the motives of nature and ornament created by humans - in a way that we see nature and culture swapping sides: what represents the nature here is all sharp and ordered while the culture part is unsophisticated and unsolicited. 

For as long as culture has existed it has entertained the desire to fly, to be as free as birds, to overcome gravity and take off - we often see it in our dreams when the physical effort to raise above the ground feels so small that we are asking ourselves how did we not know it before. Today the effortless freedom of movement is something we are longing for while most borders are still closed, quarantine restrictions slightly loosened but still in place and also, nearly forgotten in all this ordeal, the final stage of Brexit is looming.

Two of my friends in London, Europeans, recently bought one-way tickets to their home countries - and when will I be able to go and visit them? When will I be able to visit my own home country? The year this photograph was taken was the year I came to live in the UK. It was not part of a well thought through plan, but a reaction to events in my life - I desperately needed change. It worked for me - as it did for so many others. And today is the time when many of us need change again, to close one door and open another.

This is the last ‘Picture of the Week’ from the exhibition ‘We’ by John Peter Askew. We had put the pictures up on the walls of Pushkin House a day before the lockdown and they are still there, in the house, invisible to all. Our essays of lockdown have been full of hope and positive thinking about the future, but we never forgot the tragedy that put us all in the solitude of our homes. There has been lot of unpronounced sadness among us - even in those who were not directly affected by excessive suffering and death in the world during the past few months. We were trying to cheer up and support each other, to be just kind and be together. But we were also looking froward to a fresh start. We are turning over this page now - to start a new one. Goodbye!

Elena Zaytseva

Elena Zaytseva is curator of the current Pushkin House exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.