Art review: St Petersburg: Reflections of a Floating Life

Published on Tuesday 15 June 2010 19:43

ST PETERSBURG: REFLECTIONS OF A FLOATING LIFE **** SCOTLAND-RUSSIA INSTITUTE, EDINBURGH

CRAIG Brandist clearly likes to keep himself busy. As a professor at the University of Sheffield's Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, he teaches on no fewer than eight different degree-level courses and has written several books about the history and culture of the USSR. That would be more than enough to keep most people occupied, but somehow he has also found time to become an adept and imaginative photographer.

Since the early 1990s, Brandist has been a regular visitor to St Petersburg and this exhibition consists of a series of untitled photographs he took there in 2008 and 2009, using the city's various waterways as a distorting mirror in which to reflect its people and architecture.

In some images, the surface of the water is barely disturbed so the subjects are almost perfectly represented, with only minor, impressionistic ripples around their edges. In others, though, the water is choppier, producing a kaleidoscope effect, with windows and doors bent and twisted into impossible shapes.

Another group seem entirely abstract: there is nothing recognisable being reflected except colour and light, so the water itself becomes the subject, sometimes oily smooth, sometimes stirred into tiny ripples by the wind.

The highlight is a triptych of two men in conversation. Both wearing US-style baseball caps, they are standing on a bridge or balcony. Following the sequence from left to right, their heads and torsos seem to expand and contract with the ebb and flow of the water, as if they were walking slowly through a hall of mirrors.