Leningrad
In 1978 I went to Russia for the first time. One of ten British students of Russian, I spent three months at Leningrad State University. Those thirteen weeks were easily the most exciting and fascinating of my life and I have never quite recovered from them. I cherish the memories I made there but for too long, however, I have kept them more or less to myself.
It is always difficult to describe to someone who has not lived through the same time and place exactly what it felt like to be there. To describe the Soviet Union to someone who did not experience it is almost impossible, especially as it no longer exists.
Those three months in Leningrad were wild, frenetic and full of sensation and the memories are no less so. I have only to think of a particular incident and I remember the quality of the light, the heat or the cold, the smells, colours and voices with remarkable clarity. There were Communist party slogans everywhere on walls, badges, banners, the radio and television, and coming out of the very mouths of people we met.
My series of prints is a way of gathering into a coherent collection the impressions and memories I have of that glorious, heedless, unhinged, culture-shocked time more than forty years ago.
It is always difficult to describe to someone who has not lived through the same time and place exactly what it felt like to be there. To describe the Soviet Union to someone who did not experience it is almost impossible, especially as it no longer exists.
Those three months in Leningrad were wild, frenetic and full of sensation and the memories are no less so. I have only to think of a particular incident and I remember the quality of the light, the heat or the cold, the smells, colours and voices with remarkable clarity. There were Communist party slogans everywhere on walls, badges, banners, the radio and television, and coming out of the very mouths of people we met.
My series of prints is a way of gathering into a coherent collection the impressions and memories I have of that glorious, heedless, unhinged, culture-shocked time more than forty years ago.