Blue Valentines

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sep 8

In Blue Valentines, Russia-based artist Ida Anderson transforms the fragile form of a postcard into a vessel for memory, loss and longing. Using the cyanotype process, she renders Moscow in shades of haunting blue — part love letter, part elegy. Juxtaposing tenderness with unease, these images ask what it means to belong, to leave, and to remember a homeland fractured by war.

Photography Ida Anderson

Blue Valentines is a special set of photographic postcards created using the cyanotype process— a historic technique known for its deep, melancholic blue hues.

These images, tinged with both tenderness and sorrow, act as intimate yet piercing reminders of a fractured love — for one’s native city, for one’s homeland. They reflect a longing that is both personal and political, evoking a sense of exile not just from a place, but from a time and a way of life that now feel irretrievably lost.

These images, tinged with both tenderness and sorrow, act as intimate yet piercing reminders of a fractured love — for one’s native city, for one’s homeland.

In this series, idyllic views of Moscow are juxtaposed with more unsettling scenes: police barricades, solitary women, brawling pigeons, a shuttered bar named “Svododa” («Freedom» – eng.) undergoing reconstruction, and a plume of smoke rising from a fire. These symbols —subtle and stark — capture the emotional texture of a turbulent era.

As in the Tom Waits song that gives the project its name, Blue Valentines speaks to a grief that lingers, impossible to shake. The sense of loss resonates among those who oppose the war, whether they remain in Moscow or have found themselves in faraway cities like Buenos Aires. In this shared sense of displacement, Blue Valentines creates space for collective memory and the possibility of healing across ruptured ties.

Ultimately, this project is a kind of photographic blues — a visual elegy — for Russian émigrés who left their country in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The postcards are designed to be mailed: intimate fragments of experience sent across borders, connecting friends and loved ones in a scattered yet enduring community.

About Ida

Ida Anderson is the creative pseudonym of Anna Komissarova, an artist and practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist from Russia. She graduated from the UNIC Institute of Culture, the DocDocDoc School of Contemporary Photography, and studied in the workshops of Kir Esadov and Polina Muzyka. Author of an educational course and publications dedicated to the psychoanalysis of contemporary art and photography.

To see more of her work, make sure to follow her on Instagram

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Blue Valentines

These images, tinged with both tenderness and sorrow, act as intimate yet piercing reminders of a fractured love — for one’s native city, for one’s homeland.

The postcards are designed to be mailed: intimate fragments of experience sent across borders, connecting friends and loved ones in a scattered yet enduring community.

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