Getty Museum
School, Moscow, Russia, 1989
Creator
Carl de KeyzerBelgian Photographer · 1958–present
All works by this person →> De Keyzer does not allow himself to be enticed into casual photography. He travels in areas and finds himself in situations where any trace of change is barely noticeable. In the choices he makes and in his well-considered photography he manages to capture an atmosphere which perhaps will soon really belong to the past. Carl de Keyzer has spent his career in photojournalism documenting the daily
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- negative 1989; print 1992
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- Belgian
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Attentive students in a Moscow classroom concentrate on their studies while Carl de Keyzer, a photojournalist, documents their activity. De Keyzer visited the former Soviet Union a dozen times between August 1988 and August 1989, recording the effects of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost reforms. Some of the images he made during this period illustrate that in certain areas, such as education, change was barely noticeable. De Keyzer's visit to the school prompted a great deal of excitement among the students. He noted that "each time I walk into a classroom, accompanied by the guide and the director, boys and girls leap out of their seats to greet us." Comparing the atmosphere of the Russian classroom of the 1990s with his education experience in the 1960s, he said, "The benevolent discipline, the teaching methods, the entire atmosphere take me back to my own elementary class in Flanders . . . . We had Christ . . . , they have Marx, Lenin, and Gorbachev."
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