Those photographs, which initiated Titarenko’s “St. Petersburg” series in 1991, marked the beginning of his interest in the expressive potential of photography and grew into “City of Shadows,” a suite of haunting images of Saint Petersburg crowds that occupied him until 1994. The series won him acclaim in his hometown and convinced him that this kind of photography was worth exploring. “I began to take images because I felt that it was my mission,” he remembers. As the economy collapsed, “the changes happened so quickly and so dramatically, and it was so huge a shock, that it changed me internally. It made me a different person. I said to myself, I can’t stay inside of my room when disaster is happening. I have a good camera, a lot of film.”