Artist's commentary
June 6, 1944, D-day, Normandy. The landing of US troops on Omaha beach.
I was able to retake these photographs in November 2010, on the opening day of my exhibition in the French city of Honfleur, organized by Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Honfleur is relatively close to Omaha Beach, and journalist Fyodor Klimkin and I decided to find the place where our allies landed in 1944. Time was short, and we didn't find the place right away (we had neither a map nor a GPS).
So I only managed to identify two points from photographs, and even the first was rather tentative: there's a monument at the landing site, and I used it as a reference.
The second photograph was taken from a hill located a little over a kilometer east of the monument. A surviving pillbox to the right, behind the paratroopers, helped me identify it. The entire hill is now overgrown with thorny brambles as tall as a man, making it very difficult to get to the spot from which the old photograph was taken. Basically, it's all here:
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