Graves

The Shikatogov Family

In Moscow, graves are kept like living rooms.

Vote for PurePhotography.Com in the Maxim Photographers contest
A visitor tending a Moscow grave with oval porcelain portraits of the Shikatogov family

Russian cemeteries tend their dead the way other places tend their houses — swept, planted, photographed, visited. The porcelain portraits fired onto enamel don't fade the way paper does, so the Shikatogovs look out at the street, generation after generation.

I took this while a visitor was tending the grave, straightening what the winter had knocked over. That is the whole tradition in one gesture: you are still one of us, and we are still coming.