ida anderson - blue valentines
A cyanotype elegy for a fractured homeland
There is a kind of sorrow that resists articulation, a grief so intimate, it slips through language and settles instead in images.
Blue Valentines, a haunting set of photographic postcards, dares to give this grief a shape. Created using the cyanotype process, the series takes on the unmistakable melancholy of deep Prussian blue, a hue historically associated with memory, longing and loss.
Drawing its name from the Tom Waits song, Blue Valentines mourns not a singular heartbreak but a layered, collective one: the rupture between a person and their homeland, the estrangement from one’s native city, the fracture of a way of life that now feels distant and irretrievable.
For many Russian émigrés, those who opposed the war and left in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this project becomes a mirror to their own exile, a visual elegy to the life they once knew.
At the heart of Blue Valentines lies a poignant duality. The cyanotypes capture idyllic glimpses of Moscow, tree-lined streets, golden-hour skylines, but interspersed among them are quieter, more disquieting scenes: a shuttered bar named Svododa (“Freedom”) under reconstruction, women standing alone with unreadable expressions, flocks of pigeons in chaotic flight, police barricades that suggest both control and collapse, and the slow, ominous curl of smoke from an unseen fire. These juxtapositions underscore a deeper tension:
the simultaneous beauty and brutality of memory.
The emotional texture of Blue Valentines is neither didactic nor overtly political, yet it is deeply informed by the politics of the personal. Each image feels like a quiet act of resistance, a refusal to forget or normalize. The cyanotype medium, with its tactile, hand-crafted quality, emphasizes this intimacy. Unlike digital photographs, these prints require care and time, the sun itself becoming a collaborator in the image-making process. The result is work that feels at once ghostly and enduring, soft yet unflinching.
What makes Blue Valentines particularly poignant is its format: postcards. These are meant to be mailed, to travel. Each one carries the potential for connection across distance, for small acts of remembrance and solidarity. In a time of fractured relationships and scattered communities, the project reclaims the postcard as a vessel of tenderness, a fragment of shared experience sent across borders, across time zones, across emotional and political divides.
More than anything, Blue Valentines creates space. A space to grieve, to remember, to reconnect. A space where the pain of exile becomes legible, where those who’ve left, and those who’ve stayed, can find one another again, if only through the slow arrival of a blue-hued image in the mail.
In the end, this project is a kind of photographic blues: a soulful lament rendered in cyan. A postcard elegy for a home that no longer exists as it once did. A gesture toward healing, tender and unresolved.
Ida Anderson is the creative pseudonym of Anna Komissarova, an artist and practicing 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.