It helps to be far from your heroes. I discover it again and again about every two years. Two or three weeks are enough. After that you have to go home and start to sort out what you have just seen. Because what you see there every time is huge.

My heroes live in small apartments. Most of them do not have cars and never travel abroad. But their lives are full and competitive. They are very educated and extremely skeptical about themselves, their countries and the strange guy with the camera who, they know, grew up among them and found another life somewhere else. Why does he return from his happy country? What on earth can be interesting about them and the lives they lead?

At times I ask myself the same questions. And most often I arrive at this answer. For me, Eastern Europe today is the place where human nerve endings come as close to the surface as nowhere else. History and circumstances have made this part of the world a colossal testing ground for human endurance and endeavor.

My heroes live by very different rules. They have to compromise much more often than you or I. Honor and money, honesty and greed, health and pleasure, memory and truth. From all of this, I derive my own compromise – that between art and document.

Guennadi Maslov, Cincinnati, Ohio.