Forest. Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl, February, 2006 by Donald Weber

This photograph from Donald Weber is not my favorite photograph of all the images he submitted. This one is. But this photograph of an orange car as seen from the woods around Chernobyl is much easier to write about than the photograph of a young girl grinning at a rabbit skin while a man behind her dresses the flesh of the animal for dinner, which is part of Weber's point. He writes:

What's important about this work, in my view, is that it reveals the fateful intersection of history and the human soul. The West has its own versions of materialism; we may pretend that these people and their sad condition have nothing to do with us. But something in their eyes tells us more than we want to know. We are being tested, all of us. These photos confront us with the inescapable truth: life is a journey through a dark wood. We must take it one step at a time.

So, yes, I chose the photograph that literally presents the dark wood, and the journey. But I chose it because before I looked at the titles of the works and before I read Weber's statement it reminded me of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a book I haven't been able to get out of my system and have read twice in the last twelve months. As I read the book, I felt like I was seeing, from much the same vantage point as this photograph was taken, the young boy and his father as they shuffled along the dark road through gray and snowy post-apocalyptic woods. In my mind, I translated the photograph, to the work of fiction, and back to real life, realizing faint horror in hoping that Chernobyl is the closest we ever come to an apocalypse.
In the book, the boy and his father continue on their desolate and often terrifying path because they are the good guys, they are "carrying the fire." They must continue on, one step at a time.