The shots not taken

We were up in St. Petersburg over the Christmas weekend and had a wonderful time. I woke up early nearly every morning we were there (the remnants of jet lag) and wandered around in the snow, taking pictures of the streets. Somehow St. Petersburg is beautiful all by itself, with or without its inhabitants creating more interesting photographs. Moscow, on the other hand, is not so photogenic - I find that the Moscow photos I'm happiest with generally involve people or their ephemeral traces - graffiti, litter, construction scaffolding - rather than permanent-seeming, stately buildings.

Be that as it may, I wanted to briefly mention a few things I didn't photograph while I was in SPB:

1) A lovely, two-storey-tall Christmas tree, in the garden of what I think is the Yusupov Palace right next to the sledding hill which I remember from 20 years ago and which is still in intensive use. This emblem of holiday cheer left no doubt as to its sponsor - the large, four-pointed star on its top bore the Gazprom logo and was colored in the company's signature blue.

2) The venerable Bukinist store on Liteiny Prospekt, which is now sadly shut down, the door padlocked and the shelves empty. One feature of the interior which I never fully appreciated before is the kitschy "Staraya Kniga" mural on one of the walls. No doubt that will be lost to history when the prime retail space is turned over to a more profitable tenant.

3) An anti-G-8 stencil identical to the one in the photo above but on the wall of a building located at the busy intersection of Nevsky and Liteiny. The shot would have included a Nevsky Prospekt address placard, the stencil, and a traffic policeman using one of those built-in control boxes to regulate the stoplights. As you might imagine, it was the presence of the cop that gave me second thoughts about taking the picture.