NRC — formerly NRC Handelsblad, the influential Dutch national daily newspaper where I worked as a freelance photographer from 1991 to 2014 — has published my reportage from one of today’s Russian regions: the Urals.

Reportage:

What can be seen of the war in Russia? This Russian photographer shows life beyond Moscow: “That is where Putin’s showcase of pro…

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Approximate reading time: 1–2 minutes. Oleg Klimov | Freelancer

On 19 August 2026, thirty-five years will have passed since the attempted coup in the Soviet Union. In the decades sin…

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Some cities change their names naturally — through language, rivers, trade, memory, and time. Others are given a name from above: like a new passport, a party card, or a posthumous medal for a man who…

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To: Editors / Photo Editors only

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Photography can be taught. But learning to use a camera is not the same as learning to see.

In contemporary photography, form is often borrowed mechanically. Students are taught to photograph “the way it is fashionable in the West” or “the way I do…

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Hi everyone,

A new long-form photo essay is now up on my website: ‘Russia’s Golden Ring — Excursions in the Interior of Russia’. The Golden Ring is often sold as Russia’s beautiful past—monasteries, onion…

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Approximate reading time: 6–7 minutes. По-русски

Hello photographers,

This week’s brief is not about Russia, not about women, and not about the usual carousel of open calls. It is about a grant — and about the photographer whose name it carries.

The Stanley Greene…

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Approximate reading time: 10–12 minutes. По-русски

Hello, photographers,
This week’s overview has turned out to be no shorter than the…

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Kaliningrad Region is one of the few places in Russia where the question Who are we? is not abstract philosophy but a matter of everyday identity. Alexei S., 21, a student at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federa…

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I spent a total of three months in a residential psychoneurological institution (known in Russia as a PNI). During that time, I made approximately 500 portraits of its residents and observed daily life inside one of Russia’s most closed and stigmatized institutional systems.

Over time, I stopped using knives and forks—only spoons were permitted—saw a Russian Orthodox iconostasis installed in the cafeteria, and shopped at a store where no one ever uses cash, as residents are never given their pensions directly.

While getting to know my neighbors and teaching them mathematics and photography, I became convinced that a person’s environment and way of life shape them at least as much as the traits they are born with.

In the spring of 2025, I held a small exhibition presenting the future book in Saint Petersburg. The exhibition ran for two weeks at the Lermontov Library on Ligovsky prospect, until one visitor filed a formal complaint, accusing me of implying that my exhibition about people with mental illness portrayed Russia itself as a psychiatric hospital.

Paradoxically, the woman who wrote the complaint was, in a certain sense, partly right—although I have never stated this openly. In my defense, I can say that Russia today is not only psychologically unwell, but has also, in many ways, become an outcast itself.

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Buy the photo book OUTCASTS in Russian

From the outset, I planned to publish THE OUTCASTS as a bilingual book, in both English and Russian. For now, however, I have only been able to raise funds for printing in Russia, thanks to crowdfunding on the Planeta.ru platform. This is my first book published in Russian, and I am genuinely happy about that.

Will it be published in English or Dutch? I am far from certain, given the prevailing perception of Russia as a country of “outcasts.” I say this as someone who has worked for international mass media for more than thirty years and who today experiences not only the global crisis of photojournalism, but also a very specific attitude toward the “Russian passport” I carry—alongside my press credentials as a photojournalist.

At some point, someone decided that it was acceptable to treat them as so ugly and insane that they did not even have the right to see themselves. When I showed them their portraits, the reaction was always the same: recognition and joy. We lose our sanity when we lose our personal identity.

Even though there are geniuses and people considered insane, people judged as beautiful and ugly, people diagnosed with mental illness and those who consider themselves completely healthy, we must learn to understand one another and live together.

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Reading time: approximately 10–12 minutes. По-русски

Intro: This week’s note is longer than usual. It is less a news digest than an attempt to describe what has happened to documentary photography and photojournalism in Russia after the collapse …

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По-русски

The majestic arched bridge over the Neman River today connects Russia and Lithuania — the external border between the Russian Federation and the European Union. Its portal is still decorated with a bas-relief of Queen Louis…

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По-русски

Hi everyone,

here’s my subjective weekly roundup about photography in general—and documentary work in particular. Let’s go:

1. Rene Matić wins the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026

The main news of the week: Rene Matić has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 20…

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I keep travelling through Russia’s Golden Ring: from cemetery to cemetery. A thousand years of history—and what remains are monuments and graves. From the murdered Tsarevich Dmitry to a soldier of the “special military operation,” whose body—fortunately for his relatives—was brought back from Ukraine to Russia. Russ…

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Forty years ago, on 26 April 1986, Chernobyl tore through the Soviet system in a way no political speech ever could. The explosion was not only a technological disaster; it was an information disaster. Radioactive contamination could not be censored, rewritten, or contained by slogans…

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Consequences of the Chernobyl accident on April 26, 1986 (also known as the Chernobyl disaster) involved the destruction of the reactor at the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near the city of Pripyat (Kyiv region, Ukrainian SSR, now Ukraine). The reactor destruction was explosive, resulting in the complete destruction of the reactor core and a massive release of radioactive substances into the environment. This accident is considered the largest in the history of nuclear power, both regarding the estimated number of deaths and people affected, as well as economic damage.

Unlike the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the explosion at Chernobyl resembled a very powerful "dirty bomb," where radioactive contamination was the primary damaging factor. The radioactive cloud from the burning reactor spread various radioactive materials, primarily radionuclides of iodine and cesium, across much of Europe. The most significant radioactive fallout occurred in areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Over 115,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometer exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant. Extensive resources were mobilized to mitigate the consequences, with more than 500,000 people participating in cleanup and containment efforts.

The Chernobyl accident also had significant social and political implications for the USSR, affecting the investigation into its causes. Experts do not have a unified opinion on the precise causes of the accident. Although the explanations provided by different nuclear specialists share general similarities, they differ in their descriptions of the specific mechanisms that triggered and escalated the emergency situation.

Initially, information about the disaster spread through rumors due to the strict censorship imposed by Soviet mass media. Despite the jamming of Western broadcasts, including Voice of America, partial transmissions reached Siberia and other regions, bringing awareness of the incident. Eventually, it became evident that censorship could not suppress the details of the Chernobyl disaster. This marked the emergence of Glasnost—a policy of increased transparency and openness, granting Soviet citizens broader access to information for the first time.

People don't live here because of radiation. However, the presence of painted human figures somehow encourages us to think that they are or were here, or perhaps only their souls remain, appearing on the walls of the ruined city, trying to communicate their thoughts and feelings.

Radiation is unique. It cannot be touched or seen by the human eye. It is somewhat comparable to a spirit—something whose presence we know about but sometimes seriously doubt. Perhaps the combination of these two invisible “substances” creates visibility when superimposed? Or maybe a passionate artist, feeling like a spirit, simply painted these figures on the walls of Pripyat?

Forty years after the Chernobyl disaster, I still don’t know the answer to that question.

Oleg Klimov. Photographer’s Diary

The bell tower of St Nicholas Cathedral, flooded during the construction of the Uglich Reservoir (1940, Stalinist era). The cathedral itself disappeared under water; only the bell tower remained.

It’s striking how the tragedy of thousands of people along the Volga—who lost …

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In October 2001, a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, I traveled to Afghanistan as a freelance photographer together with Dutch correspondent of the newspaper NRC-Handelsblad. It was the beginning of what would be call…

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