…but the winter here is too long*

“I love this city, but the winter here is too long,” sings the band Kino in their song “The City”. This line perhaps best captures how most St. Petersburg residents feel about winter. The city’s weather is an inseparable part of its identity — reflected in literature, painting, and graphic art, as well as in folk sayings and enduring epithets. It is in the St. Petersburg winter that the city’s famously changeable climate, a notion that has become almost a cliché, reveals itself most vividly.

Each season transforms the city’s appearance and mood. In winter, St. Petersburg takes on its own unique character, visual codes, and motifs that could never escape a photographer’s eye. After all, photography is the medium best suited for capturing subtle changes, fleeting moments, striking contrasts, and the elusive atmosphere of a place.

The image of St. Petersburg is one of the central motifs of the photographers’ work, featured at the exhibition. In this sense, shooting the city in winter offers yet another opportunity to see it anew — to capture what is fleeting, to reinterpret familiar canons and classical subjects. The works presented in the exhibition were created at different times by classics of St. Petersburg photography. Each image is both a personal stylistic and conceptual statement, and a reflection of the influences and traditions of its era.

The photographs of the 1960s–1970s are distinguished by precise and balanced compositions. In the 1980s, photographers began to turn toward more spontaneous scenes and unexpected subjects, while by the 1990s and beyond, they were experimenting with angles, compositional structures, and printing techniques. Despite these differences in artistic vision, all the works are united by one thing — the presence of a special beauty of the St. Petersburg winter, which we may overlook as we make our way through the snow, frost, and wind, thinking that “the winter here is too long.”