Blue Valentines is a series of photographic postcards that carry the sweet and cruel weight of nostalgia. Ida Anderson, the pseudonym of Russian artist and psychoanalyst Anna Komissarova, created them using the cyanotype process, a historic technique that dyes each image a deep, almost aching blue. It’s a color that seems to never fade, like certain memories that refuse to leave.

In these postcards, idyllic glimpses of Moscow coexist with more unsettling fragments: police barricades, solitary women, pigeons in a scuffle, a bar called “Svoboda” (“Freedom”) closed for renovations, a column of smoke rising from a fire. These are details that become symbols, visual clues of a turbulent era, of a broken love for one’s city and one’s homeland.

The project takes its title from a Tom Waits song, and like that melody, it tells of a pain that never stops throbbing. It speaks to those who oppose the war, whether they have chosen to stay in Moscow or live in distant cities such as Buenos Aires. In this shared sense of uprooting, Blue Valentines opens a space for collective memory and for possible—if slow—healing among torn bonds.

Ida Anderson turns photography into a kind of visual blues, an elegy dedicated to those who left Russia after February 24, 2022, the date of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The postcards are meant to actually travel, to cross borders and oceans, carrying intimate fragments of experience to those somewhere in the world who are waiting for news from a friend, a lover, a community dispersed but still alive.