THREE rows of frozen shirts stand eerily unsupported in the snow against the backdrop of a forest.

The image is entitled Portrait and is taken from Vestige, Riitta Paivalainen's series of ice pictures that depicts clothing in icy or windy spaces to suggest traces of human presence within landscapes.

Spend time with the picture upstairs at Impressions Gallery, in Castlegate, York, and the colours and formation of the shirts take on a greater significance. The bottom row comprises rural shirts, blue-collar shirts, shirts for physical labour. By the top row, the shirts are white, and so Paivalainen hauntingly encapsulates the march of industry into the countryside: a march with a deadening, ghostly impact.

Portrait features in Facing East, the first of two In From The Cold shows at Impressions that address the legacy of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union.

Sixteen photographers from the Baltic region, including fledgling EC member states Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, reflect on their changing environment, and the unifying theme is one of rural traditions making way for a new rural order in photographs that subvert the country idyll.

In Juha Suonpaa's Wilderness series, the bloated body of a cow floats in perfect blue water beneath a perfect blue sky and an intrusive photographer, with camouflage on his long-lens camera and his head masked by an animal skull, conducts a prying form of rural shooting.

The people in Gatis Rozenfelds's Weekends series, such as the woman beneath an umbrella in her mother's garden, are all walking away from the camera, as if to represent their passing into time.

Facing East is a portent of change: the breath of nature and rural identity being crushed by economic demands and industrial encroachment. It will chime with all those concerned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries making way for DEFRA and its "Rural Affairs": the march of the white shirt.

Updated: 16:00 Thursday, January 13, 2005