RIA Novosti is opening the doors of the global photo space for Russian photographers – the first international portfolio review will be held in Moscow in 2012. Frederic Baldwin , the founder of Houston FotoFest International, and Wendy Watriss, the festival’s art director, told RIA Novosti how to help young talents in an exclusive interview.

Why did you, as an organizer of the Houston Fest, decide to choose Russia as the main subject of the coming Fest in 2012?

Watriss: Because there is a very strong history, visual history of photography in Russia, and not many people know what's happening with young photographers today in Russia. That there was this great market interest in Russia in the 90s and the early part of the 21st century, and then it kind of dropped off. And I think it's very difficult for younger artists, even though there's the internet and everything else, but there's money difficulties, and language difficulties, so they're not getting abroad, and important publishers and museum people and gallery [people] don't know what's happening here.

Baldwin: Also, it's a little bit instinctive. We feel -- we travel a lot, we traveled I think last year 90,000 miles all over the world. In our travels, we begin to accumulate sort of a feeling of what's happening with us, things are warming up, and we're both photojournalists by background, and Wendy's also a journalist, a writer, so we have a nose for talking to people, and feeling, and we learn by talking to people who are involved in the culture of the countries that we visit -- artists, and all kinds of people. But we feel that Russia was very hot at one time, and then things have sort of cooled off, and we also feel that that has nothing to do with what's going on in terms of the talent here -- that there's a whole generation that has perhaps been ignored, or not ignored, but is just not known about, they're just very quiet, and we thought it's time to get back here and to open ourselves to this situation.

Watriss: We've shown a lot of Russian photography. We've shown work from the 1890s through 1925, then we've shown the famous magazine, USSR in Construction -- 40 real, you know original issues of it. Then work from the 80s, a lot of work from the 80s and early 90s.

Baldwin: Even Soviet photography, our first exhibition was in 1990, Soviet photography, so it was quite early for American audiences.

Watriss: Well, I don't think actually there was so much interest in that Soviet period from, say, the 40s, 50s, after the Avant-garde period. But there was a big interest after Perestroika and Glasnost. And the years after Perestroika, sure. Then there became a big interest, really for 15 years, and the market, there was a very big market for it also. And then the market turned in the direction of China, and you see very very little Russian art in the London auctions, or not very much in exhibitions, and very little Russian photography being shown. So we hope to correct that. For 2012, there is the period from the late 50s -- Khrushchev period and what began to be an individual voice, both in editorial and journalistic photography and personal, creative photography. Then that famous period from the 80s, 90s, say, until 2005 or 6, and the third is the younger people today.

Do you hope that things will change, and that with your help and with the help of everyone else you will try to make?

Watriss: Yes, I think, both with the portfolio here, in Moscow next month at Garage, and then -- that's, like, the first step. And bringing very very important and influential photography people from all over Europe and the United States, and some from Latin American and Canada, and some from Asia now as well. So they're coming to see Russian photography, coming here to see that.

Will it be a special commission to choose the photos?

Watriss: A jury. Five people. Both Russians and non-Russians. For Moscow, for the portfolio review, the notice went out on the website, portfolioreview-russia.org, I believe it is, which Novosti is a partner for that. And that is to anybody who wanted to sign up, anybody, any age, any place, only Russia and the Ukraine and Belarus. We have already received thousands of works. It's going to be extremely difficult to choose.

How many works will be chosen?

Baldwin: Up to about two hundred.

Watriss: There's a system that we've developed, whereby every person who participates as a reviewer, we call it -- they can see, I think, 11 to 12 people a day. Otherwise you're just exhausted, and you can't do a good job anymore. And this is a portfolio being offered for Russian photographers for free. But every reviewer that comes to Russia, you're paying airfare, you're paying hotel, you're paying meal. So there is a budget, financially, that wasn't possible to do this time. We hope there will be other times, other years. But this time it was only about 200 people. So unfortunately one has to make some choices out of the several thousand that applied. If we all had enough resources, it would be nice to be able to have a portfolio review where you could accommodate 2,000 people. But we don't. We have a limited number of spaces, unfortunately. And so, the spaces can accommodate up to about 200 people from several thousand who have registered. Now, Fred and I haven't seen that work yet. We have personally not seen that work yet. So it's very hard for us to comment on that. But we have heard that there are, you know, hundreds that are very very strong.

Who, or what, which tendencies, maybe, are forming the photography market nowadays in Europe and in the United States? Which tendencies, the main trends of forming the photo market in the West?

Watriss: A lot of it is staged photography, staged conceptual photography, much of it dealing with kind of social issues that are particularly personal, often semi-erotic issues, gender issues, that were not dealt with as directly as they're being dealt with now. And partly because it's staged, it's created photography, it's not a news photographer going out and finding situations, and so forth. So what you see on the market now of contemporary work is predominantly staged work, big pictures, and very in-your-face color. Not very much black and white.

Baldwin: With the marketplace it's a very different phenomenon, because what you have controlling much of what the marketplace is, is money. Well then there's Basel, there's Miami Basel, there's Paris Photo, there are all of these things. These are marketplaces. And these are composed of galleries. Now, when you go to a gallery, how many pictures are you going to see? Now they have a lot of them in the drawer, but you will see one, two, three works from an artist. Okay. What they're interested in is selling that work. And their trends that move choices in terms of what's hot, what's new - in my personal feeling, that covers a limited range of what's possible, and what's good, and what's interesting. There's a lot of work that's not conceptual --a lot of that work is good, but there's a lot of work that isn't covered, that hasn't reached the attention of people who are going to try to make some money with it. They're the ones that get the most attention. In terms of the kinds of things that festivals do and that these reviews do, we're not interested in marketplace. What we're interested in is trying to find, within the choices, ideas, creativity, energy, commitment, organization of ideas - and it may be work that will become part of the marketplace later. But that's not our motivation. What we're trying to find is - and it's instinctive. We've been doing this, we're photographers ourselves, we actually were freelance photojournalists and documentary photographers. Now we're interested in the broadest possible range. But we know what it feels like to be a photographer. We know the struggles. And we're interested in helping people who have the energy, the commitment, the courage to go out and work as a photographer. It is not easy. It's a survival process, and most people are eliminated from it because they either can't stick with it or don't have enough talent, or one or the other or both. And today what you have is a world where thousands of photographers are being unleashed on the world because some of the photographers who can't survive by being freelancers, and they're mostly not surviving as freelancers, are teaching. When we were young photographers, there weren't any teaching institutions. You wanted to be a photographer, you taught yourself. You went out and you did it. You either made it, or you didn't make it. Okay, now, in every state in the United States, there are x-number of schools where you can go and learn photography. So they're generating thousands of photographers. And it's the same in Europe. So what you have is this very large body, among which there are some good people. Among which there are some people that are brave enough to actually commit themselves seriously to photography. The others are going to try it for a while, and then they're going to drop dead, do something else, or become teachers. That's the situation as I see it. So we have to deal with that, and what we do not want to give up on is those spirits who are strong enough, and talented enough to express themselves. And the reason for that is, we feel that artists are valuable in this world. We look for people -- and it doesn't matter what kind, musicians, sculptors, photographers, architects -- we need people who can think beyond the obvious. We need more of those people in the world, not fewer of them. So that's what we're going after, that's our personal commitment. And it's tough. It's not easy. So that's what the Russian review's about, what the one in Paris is about, we did one in China.

Watriss: It's to open the doors,give people a chance, and then it's up to them. You cannot go into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the International Center of Photography, or the Stedelijk in Amsterdam -- most photographers cannot get through the door. This is a way of breaking that down. And saying, because we known them, and say, look, there's good work here, let's give it a chance. So those kind of people are coming here to look at photographers whose work they don't know. And it's opening doors for people here in Russia. We know as photojournalists how difficult it was when we, respectively started out, in the 50s, and I in the 60s. You know, it was difficult to get through the door. No matter how good you were quite often.

Would you be so kind as to mention some names, some names of photographers which, from your point of view, are the greatest photographers nowadays.

Watriss: Oh, I think Doug and Mike Starn, they're called the Starn Brothers, they're among the best. A man who's not solely a photographer but uses photography in his work is Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean photographer. He’s from Chile, but lives in New York.

A Guatemalan artist, Luis González Palma. A British artist, Simon Norfolk - he's done a lot of work in Afghanistan and Iraq, actually.

Baldwin: He's a conceptually photographer in a way. I mean, he will take a photograph, and they're very beautiful, large-format photographs, and in the corner you may see something that tells you that there's something ominous there. It's very subtle. You may see an old something from the war, a piece of derelict equipment, or something like that. So it's very subtle, so he's not in your face with it, it's not a tank firing a gun, shooting off, it's something else, it's a more reflective thing, and I think it's very powerful.

Watriss: And I do think among the very interesting artists is the Russian Sergei Bratkov, and AES+F. I think they're extremely good.

What is your opinion - is it a serious obstacle in the real art of photography, ad photography, so-called commercial photography -- is it a real obstacle for creativity?

Baldwin: I don't think so. No, no, no.

Watriss: No, I don't think so either.  Actually, the very creative people use it. I mean, when we talk about the marketplace, which is different from everybody else practicing photography, I mean it's only a small portion of it. But a lot of that conceptual work, that staged work, is actually using advertising techniques. So creative people are always looking everywhere for their sources.

So even in advertising we can find very creative photographers

Watriss: Oh, sure. Look in painting, like Roy Lichtenstein, who was one of the great pop-artists -- he was taking from advertising. And so a lot of very good photographers are doing that now. And I think there's a team of very very very good Russian artists -- AES+F. A lot of their work is based on video games off the internet that they recreate in very different kinds of forms. Now they are very well-known. They are probably, among the contemporary artists, among the best known. And they do have galleries in London and in New York and so forth..

It's kind of a new vision on photography and the art itself?

Watriss: Yeah. I think in the hands of creative people, the boundaries are gone.