At first, Joseph Brodsky’s choice to begin A Guide to a Renamed City with an excerpt by Susan Sontag confused me. What could a quote about photography have anything to do with St. Petersburg? As I continued to read, I began to realize that the line actually illustrates the relationship between ‘Peter’(St. Petersburg) and his people, specifically their excessive pride in themselves and their city and St. Petersburg’s ability to give Russians a space to subjectively analyze their country. In his description of the Neva River, Brodsky writes, “The … Neva… provides this city with such a quantity of mirrors that narcissism becomes inevitable”. (77) Though ‘quantity of mirrors’ does not directly reference a camera, I interpreted ‘mirror’ to be synonymous to lens in this instance. This line shows that if St. Petersburg’s inhabitants are constantly viewing snapshots of themselves, they are “re-experience[ing] the unreality and remoteness of the real” as Susan Sontag writes. Sontag’s line demonstrates that St. Petersburg’s citizens view themselves only in a flash of time instead of as an integral part of Russia’s vast history and as separate from the ‘real’, or Moscow/the rest of Russia. Even though Brodsky effectively conveys this quality in his reading, the Susan Sontag line offers a new and exciting way to read his piece. He continues the photography motif when describing St. Petersburg after the capital moved to Moscow: “Petersburg, having nowhere to withdraw to, came to a standstill-as though photographed in its nine teenth-century posture.” (88) The line ‘came to a standstill’ shows that once Moscow became the capital, St. Petersburg, a reformative city, did not revert with the rest of the country into Russia’s old conservative ways. St. Petersburg instead stood in contrast to Russia and became a place for Russians to experience a reality that did not exist in the rest of the country, therefore, accentuating the ‘remoteness of the real’, or offering an opportunity to properly assess the rest of the country.