On August 20 2010 Ms. Leah Bendavid -Val, Woodrow Wilson Center Senior Scholar and Director of Photography Publishing for National Geographic Books, spoke to a group of Novosibirsk photographers about a new photo project “Siberia - American West”. Ms. Bendavid-Val first got interested in Russian photography while working on a photo collection “Changing Reality: Recent Soviet Photography “ which displayed the changing Russian society and was exhibited in the United States in 1991. Andrei Baskakov, Chairman of the Union of Photographers of Russia, and some other leading Russian photographers participated in the discussion.