Ways of seeing

You cannot make the same deductions from what you see in images of Russia as you might from images taken in the West.

To Western eyes decaying surfaces often mean degradation and smooth renovated surfaces are a sign of confidence and well-being. Colours, symmetry, state of repair to us are important indicators of people's internal condition.

Conversely, an object's distance from an ideal of completion can be unsettling and sometimes shameful.

Here these things often matter less. There's a more detached, utilitarian approach, a different relationship to the material world. Not the same urgency for things to conform to an ideal.

In Russia men often mix dark or muted colours with relatively little attention to personal grooming or awareness of the image they project. The absence of a ready smile or desire to use external appearance as a channel for "personality" seems to outsiders like an abandonment of self respect that can only be equated with depression and resignation.

There's a tendency in the West to "put all one's attributes to the front of the store", to burden ourselves (and consequently others) with our aspirations, to identify with what we own, which one now finds in ludicrously parodied form in Moscow but is not a characteristic of people in Russia.

There's still a tradition here of giving away little publicly, of not externalising things unless in trusted company. It's still very much about human relations and personal character rather than extensions here, which is hard to capture in an image.

In Russia you take away someone's extensions (house, car, furniture etc) they still remain roughly themselves (except they might be a little pissed off!), in the West you remove the extensions and in quite a profound sense, you have an entirely different person than before.

As people here gradually become more taken over by their extensions and in some cases, like in the West, become little more than the sum of these, what seems like a gain is in fact an immeasurable loss. But there is no place for acknowledging that in the way of seeing that dominates today's world - with its undue emphasis on the visible, the measurable and a hierarchy of things.