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| © Donald Weber |
| A wife of a coalminer from Donetsk in Chernobyl, Ukraine. They moved to the Chernobyl region "because it's a lot less polluted here.." Click photo for more images. |
Age: 34
Location: Moscow, Russia, and Kiev, Ukraine
Website: donaldweber.com
"I had a sense of belonging to Russia's burdensome soul."
"I always wanted to be a photojournalist, but I certainly took a very crooked path to get there," says Donald Weber. Weber studied photography in high school in Toronto and was ready to apply to college photo programs, but was dissuaded by a teacher who told him his work "sucked." Instead, he studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design and, after graduating in 1996, moved to Europe, where he got a job with architect Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. After two years, he left and bought a motorcycle, with the idea of riding across Africa. But on a trial run Weber was hit by a car. He returned to Toronto, enrolled in a photo-journalism course, and later took jobs shooting for the Toronto Sun and the Globe and Mail.
In recent years Weber has resettled yet again -- this time in Russia and Ukraine. "When I went to Ukraine in 2004, the big story at the time was the Orange Revolution in politics there," he says. "I had always been fascinated by this part of the world. I had this sense of belonging to this burdensome soul that seems to so betray the Russian people." Weber's work has been helped along the way by assignments from the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and Der Spiegel, as well as a Guggenheim grant. His documentary project on people living near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant shows his capacity to stretch the boundaries of photojournalism and documentary photography. "It's typical of what I do -- to be in close proximity to where the news is, yet completely ignore what the news wants."
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