Most of my photography is influenced by paintings and how their decisions are made. There’s something about the formality of art contained within a rectangle that has always made me think about where an image ends and its relationship to where it’s placed. When I see a painting or photograph hung against an environment that is in some stylistic opposition to it, I always stop. As hotels where journalists and foreign aid workers stay became Russian targets, I stayed in a private rental. The wallpaper in the bedroom was bizarre, a framed fantastical landscape the only decoration. Outside, the gray city of Kherson was largely abandoned since the Ukrainians liberated it, the thud or artillery constant, Russians still firing from across the river. This serene unremarkable painting was suddenly something more. © 2023 Benjam in Busch In a hotel in Dnipro, I took my chances. At the bottom of the stairwell there was a colorful pastoral of women gathered by the shore of a river, while outside the city ground out its day in waves of large and small tragedies, no one smiling on the streets. I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the painting had there not been a paper sign taped to it directing guests to the bomb shelter. It was as if it was a modern comment on the work, a graffiti title. The combination of those simple words in black and white, the arrow pointing away from the light, the frame, the painting, and the paper made this into a new image composed of three rectangles. It’s both very literal, and abstract. The women wear garlands of flowers and the men are gone. © 2023 Benjam in Busch

Art in Context by Conflict Bronze "Southeast Asia Exhibit Map" Sculpted by James J. Nance, USAFA '71 Donated by the USAFA Class of '70 Located in Exemplar Hall near WLA Staff Offices Photo credit: WLA Staff, 2023

In Kyiv, along the Dnieper River, Soviet monuments have been torn down and graffiti artists have covered walls along the walkways. The American Javelin anti-tank missile has become a popular icon of resistance, appearing on posters and stickers throughout the country. The US has sent over 10,000 to Ukraine giving them one of the few advantages they have against the overwhelming size of Russian mechanized forces. © 2023 Benjam in Busch Under an elementary school, beneath local volunteers weaving strips of donated clothing into camouflage netting, is a dim basement used as a bomb shelter. This old portrait hung by one nail, its tips just touching the frame of my photograph, another abstract conversation between two rectangles. It’s of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian pioneer in rocket science which led to the Soviet space program. Here he was, 89 years after his death, the only face in a damp concrete room where schoolchildren hid from Russian rockets and missiles he had only imagined for exploration. © 2023 Benjam in Busch

BOOK REVIEWS Lori A. Davis Perry / The Fine Art of Camouflage: A Memoir by Lauren Kay Johnson Steven Tro ut / Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death, and the First World War by Alice Kelly FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK Tom McGuire / “A Glance Rearward: WLA 1989-2023” E DITOR'S CHOICE Elena Pedigo Clark / One Heart for Love: The Anti-War Message of Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War ARTIST SPOTLIGHT Benjamin Busch / Ukraine CRITICAL ESSAYS/COMMENTARY Thomas G. Bowie, Jr. / “The Sorrow of a Bygone Time”: Reflections of Bao Ninh’s Ha N oi at Midnight Lori A. Davis Perry / Terrorism and Tyrannicide in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Jonathan Lighter / All Quiet on the Western Front 1930, 1979, 2022 AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Donald Anderson / EXIT WOUNDS: A Conversation with Lanny Hunter FICTION C.R. Beideman / InsomnIraq Lynn Pruett / Squirrel Poker Lanny Hunter / "Actionable Intelligence" PERSONAL ESSAY John M cCarney / They Also Serve Ra y McPadden / The Patrol FILM REVIEWS Jonathan Lighter / Paths of Glory (1957) / Top Gun: Maverick (2022) CREATIVE NONFICTION J-Ross / Letter to a Friend POETRY Doug Anderson / Three Poems Tara Ballard / Two Poems Stephen Benz / Two Poems Douglas Borer / The Last Pigeon P.H. Crosby / Everyone Needs a Veteran Richard Epstein / Four Poems Stephen Gibson / Two Poems Henry Hughes / Three Poems David Lloyd (Translator) / Three Iwan Llwyd Poems Steve Nolan / Two Poems H.C. Palmer / Rag-Rug Wars Carolyne Wright / Two Poems from Masquerade backgournd image © 2023 Benjamin Busch Back to Vol 34 Cover

The Tuskegee Airmen of WWII, 1998 The Tuskegee Airman WWII, 1980s-1990s Clarence Shivers’s headstone plaque at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery The Tuskegee Airmen of WWII, 1998 1/16 Clarence Shivers Tuskegee Airman's Art and Influence José Antonio Arellano ABOUT SUBMIT TOC ARCHIVES / FOLIOS

2024 36 Featuring "FEATHERS AND FLAK" art by Terry Graff ABOUT ARCHIVES / FOLIOS SUBMIT

Nine Dialogues: Conflict in Context BENJAMIN BUSCH UKRAINE Poster in the city of Odesa, on the Black Sea, depicting a trilogy of attacks on Ukraine’s independence by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and now by Russia (represented by the white Z used to identify Russian combat vehicles). © 2023 Benjam in Busch I'm seeking the presence of something too immense to portray by any known scale. It’s more a process of mapping a national psyche by wandering its streets, sleuthing, capturing its messages in alleyways and marketplaces, its quiet domestic manifestations. I look for absences more than vulgar displays of damage, how war fills in the cracks it makes, the commonplace terrors at the edge of its gyre where it washes in as art. I prefer the strange space where the intimate is also public, Woman Reading a Letter by Johannes Vermeer rather than Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son . This is often what I find missing in the mainstream view of conflict. I’ve curated this folio largely as a collection of pictures within pictures, advertisements, graffiti, propaganda, memorials, Ukraine’s idiosyncratic portrait of itself at war. All of these photographs were taken during my second and third journeys through Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Bahkmut, Dnipro, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and the places in between during October of 2022 and August of 2023. ENTER GALLERY

Return to Volume 34 Passing Through A Gate Escort (poems)