Nice piece on NPR’s web site today looking at how Russian Valeriy Klamm and other photographers view their home country.

Next weekend, I’ll take my Documentary Photography class into the North Georgia mountains for our Ninth Annual UGA Photojournalism Weekend Workshop. Nine professionals will coach and cajole them, helping them learn their craft and tell the stories of one county. Studying these images, what can we learn? How do we not be tourists but journalists?

Russian photographer Valeriy Klamm felt that foreign photojournalists who came to work in his country arrive with the pictures they want to send back home already in their head: Bleak images of a cold and desolate place where autocrats lord over drunks.

“They already know how to take pictures of Russia, and that’s how they arrive,” Klamm said. “It’s always a wild country that’s in some kind of difficult transition period.”

Mark E. Johnson

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