A strange book, this, picked up under strange circumstances. This has to be the first time I've ever found a remaindered book from a vanity publisher!

The book is a collection of photographs of Moscow, taken by a regular visitor. Despite claiming that she visited Moscow on business, the viewpoint is one of a tourist - but a tourist with very open eyes.

The photography is either incredibly naive or very street-wise, or both. The lady who took the photographs often made certain that there was a dog or a cat in the picture, so there's an element of twee in the content. The cover picture is, frankly, awful - St.Basil's Cathedral by night in the background, and an out-of-focus dog illuminated by flash in the foreground. However, most of the rest of the pictures are better than that.

Each picture has a caption added (in Photoshop or some similar image editing application, so it covers part of the image area). Many of these are supposed to be funny. They aren't. The author claims that she has deliberately excluded the 'darker, crueller side of city life', which is perhaps as well, as unless you know what you are doing you can get into a lot of trouble poking a camera where it isn't welcome, especially in a foreign country. So why buy this?

Well, the pictures taken are of subjects most tourists wouldn't take and almost no tourist guidebooks will ever show. Ms Barrett has included pictures of vernacular architecture, shops, residential streets, sausage stands and kiosks, advertising hoardings, the Moscow Dynamo football stadium, Soviet-era stautes and the Muscovites themselves at work, play and about their daily business. Quite a few of the pictures are reasonably competant.

Edited down, quite a good collection could have been made of these pictures. A it is, it's an interesting, if rather scatter-gun approach to recording ordinary, everyday life in the Russian capital. ( )