Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
Windows on Russia
By John Bayley
The Russian Empire: A Portrait in Photographs
by Chloe Obolensky, with an introduction by Max Hayward
Random House, 345 pp., $24.95
Windows on the River Neva: A Memoir Books, Wellfleet, Massachusetts 026677)
by Paul Grabbe
Pomerica Press, 187 pp., $8.95 (Windows on the River Neva may be ordered from West lane
The art of the camera, if it is an art, is subject more than any other art to the laws of nostalgia. It needs only ten years for an advertisement in a magazine to acquire charm of a quaint, retrospective kind. Pictures with more pretension live in a limbo of modernism, of art deco. Family snapshots carry the strongest charge of emotion reconstituted in tranquility, as analyzed in Philip Larkin's poem 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album.' The camera confers on reality all the immunities possessed by art: every contingency is caught and held inside the magic circle, becoming 'smaller and clearer as the years go by.'
Review, 2239 words
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