01 June 2018

Pentimento


“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.” 
Lillian Hellman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973)

When I was college in the mid-1980s, I read Hellman's book. The haunting opening lines stayed with me ever since, as did the word itself – pentimento. In Italian, literally, repentance. In art, a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas.

It came to mind again in the last few days as I was distracted and revisiting some defunct villages around Orenburg in the Ural region of Russia. They were founded by affluent German farmers from the Black Sea area, Bessarabia and the Odessa district specifically, between 1890 and 1895. All still had populations in 1926, but most are gone today.

The most difficult to find of the German colonies in Russia, defunct colonies were wiped from history in every way possible. Abandoned, resettled, destroyed, deported, razed...whatever happened to them or why, most often nothing remained.

Except...scars.

Humans have scratched and left scars on Earth since their beginning. They cleared areas, sectioned farmsteads, built towns, built roads, planted crops and trees, engineered irrigation, buried their dead. All of this activity left scars, even after the humans were gone to wherever they went to next. The scars remained, seen mostly clearly from above.

I will leave to another post the remarkable confluence of technologies and data that had to be invented and made public over the past 40 years to make this project possible, but I will briefly mention one component: satellite imagery.

In 1972, the U.S. launched the Landsat program to capture satellite imagery of Earth. The program is still running today with the latest satellite launched in 2013. Millions of images have been taken and archived and are all viewable through the U.S. Geological Survey Earth Explorer website.

A company called Keyhole, Inc. was stitching together satellite imagery from Landsat with funding from the CIA, and in 2001 launched Keyhole Earth.  Google acquired Keyhole in 2004, renaming it Google Earth and launched Google Maps the following year in 2005.  Two years later in 2007, Google My Map launched, creating a platform for anyone to create and share their own maps.

The maps that are a part of the Germans from Russia Settlement Locations project are Google My Maps.

The desktop version of Google Earth has historical imagery available built in, which I used this past week quite a bit to see versions of those scars on Earth where our ancestors once scratched in the Urals.

The images below are of the former colony of Sivushka, also known as Birkle, Donner and Hahn (the last three may be surnames of those who lived there), south of Orenburg. Protestant, part of the Orenburg parish. The measurements dropped a pin on a rather barren space.  Looking much closer and back in time, the old paint started to show through.

Image taken 28 June 2010

"Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea..."


Image taken 20 July 2004

"That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again...."


Image taken 8 October 2002

"The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”

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