A woman bundles up behind a jumble of mismatched chairs. A man at a table leans into his palm. A veiled woman averts her eyes as she steps into the light. Some of these photos are sentences, others phrases, and still others seem to be straight out of a Joseph Brodsky poem. For Igor Posner, they represent the “half-seen, half-recollected” return to his hometown — St. Petersburg — where he had not been since coming to America as a 20-year-old Jewish refugee in the early 1990s.

When, in 2006, Igor Posner went back to Saint Petersburg, which he had left as a teenager to emigrate with his family to the United States, his position was clear: “I was not looking for the past and never went back to the places where I grew up. I wanted to be like a stranger there, and confront myself to people I would not otherwise meet people who almost scared me at times.”