We are delighted to have Ian Jeffrey — art historian, writer and curator — as a guest writer for the Picture of the Week.

The sun has its routines, interrupted and blurred by the weather. We also know approximately where we are with respect to the seasons which play a significant part in these pictures taken in or near to Perm which lies just to the west of the Ural Mountains. In this image, there is a market stall with numbered sites, 43, 44 & 45. Not much is going on but there is a range of fruit and vegetables on show, including onions, grapes and watermelons. It must have been taken just at the beginning of winter. The numbers, in scuffed whites on abraded yellow, give a discreet sense of progression. The picture asks to be spelled out, which takes time. Even the labelling on the sales items has been carried out in three different ways. An upstanding weighing machine in red adds to the impression of care. I would say that I have no option but to wonder about the range of invitations on offer, and become aware of speaking to myself, finding and trying out words and phrases.

Pinned to the wall at the top of the atrium stairwell at Pushkin House there is a picture of a man in swimming trunks – that is its laconic title. The man under a blue sky dotted with clouds inverts himself on his head and forearms. He is an athletic figure carrying out a named routine, if you cared to research it. He is probably from the host family, but his face is obscured and the caption, tucked away in the back of the book, gives no name. Lacking these circumstantial details I can try to imagine what it would feel like to place such stresses on my back and shoulders. At the market, that is to say, I became aware of myself counting and calculating and then, here on the road’s edge under the floating clouds, I consult my body. These may be ostensibly pictures about life in Russia from season to season but they are also about how I, as a representative of ordinary life, address such images as these extracted from the continuum.

The photographer sets tests, even without appearing to. He seems to have in mind an idea about progression. In the first stage I, an average examiner, identify commonplace things on show including hats, watermelons, pebbles and suchlike. Then he holds my attention long enough for another degree of attention to break through. In the case of the athlete standing strenuously on his head the point might have been to contrast his effort with the weightless clouds floating above. In another scene, Blue Hat and Stove, 2007, there is a roaring fire in a stove with an open hatch. It might stand in miniature for the blazing sun of summer. The fire is at least a fixed, significant point. The fingers of a youngster reach towards the heat, but another child, somewhat older seems to examine the palm of his hand, as if reading a lifeline. At a certain point in our lives we begin to read and to analyse. The pictures often deal in such distinctions, and the point might be that they allow us to think more rationally - in terms of worked-out statements and proposals.

From time to time he makes it clear that he has identified a legible structure, as in Young Woman and Children on Riverbank, 2009, which features three young people on the gravelled edge of a small lake. A child, like the hand-warmer by the stove, feels the pebbles under his feet. A boy, learning to swim, looks towards the camera as a young woman on a springboard completes the hierarchy. In this case the photographer expresses a developing format in three phases, a clear example of thinking in patterns. You should look out for such arrangements, he seems to say. In an impressively beautiful portrait of a young woman against a snowy background, the woman, in a dark coat, rhymes with a white church on the horizon. She looks down to her left whilst the church seems to address itself to the distance somewhere to our left. In the scene on the edge of the lake we might think of three ages of man, but in the snow scene it is the echoes in the comparison that count, and the idea of comparing or fitting appearances together to make a motto or a phrase.

Thinking involves finding manageable forms that don’t sprawl. The glowing mouth of the stove, for example, might stand in for the sun – largely absent in winter. The world itself, which might mean just about everything you could think of and which complements whatever it is that you are looking at just now, is represented here by a coloured globe hung from a ceiling, and the idea of rationality is embodied in, of all things, a cat managing all four paws on a slatted roof - without even looking. The cat, to add to the allegory, is a study in the senses: eyes, nose, ears and mouth, in a modest contrast with a buttressed telegraph pole –a prosaic stabilising element.

Having identified the likelihood of meaning there is no option but to search for it. In one of his most suggestive pictures, impassively titled Woman Holding Door, a graceful woman does just that but at the same time appears to touch her own blurred monochrome shadow as if in a transaction between spirit and flesh. His sympathies are with tangible elements but to be properly realised they need to be related to the intangible. One depends on and is even enhanced by the other. At one point in an image modestly called Wooden Fences in Winter Landscape, he hits on an emblem of life itself, for the wooden fences are counted marks, irregular like the years, propped up from time to time, and even replaced with new wood at intervals. Some have been snapped and not replaced. They rhyme, to some degree, with a dark wood beyond, undifferentiated life.

- Ian Jeffrey

Ian Jeffrey is an art historian, writer and curator. His books include How to Read a Photograph, 2008, Thames and Hudson, and The Photography Book, 1997.

The picture is part of the current Pushkin House exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.

John Peter Askew, Market Stall with Fruit and Vegetables 1996