When Rüta Kalmuka went to the Terehova border crossing between Latvia and
Russia to record the long queues of traffic there, she says she could hardly take
any photographs because the lorry drivers – held up for hours by the delays
– insisted on telling her their stories.
Rüta had run out of time on a previous visit and returned to spend the
day documenting the hold-ups.
“The drivers say that the problem is even more serious on the Russian
side, where there is just one person working on a computer and checking all
the necessary information. Corruption is also a problem,” says Rüta.
“Authorities on the Latvian site could do more to make passage across the
border easier”.
The queues started building after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
renewed independence of Latvia in 1990, when border controls were reintroduced.
They have apparently worsened in the last couple of years.
After studying photography, thirty-three year old Rüta spent three years
working on an evening newspaper in her native Riga, the Latvian capital, and
now works for the f64 agency there.
“Since 1994 I have participated in many group exhibitions in Latvia as
well as in Lithuania, Russia, France and Greece. I have also had two solo exhibitions,”
says Rüta.
A participant in a World Press Photo seminar “Young People at Risk” in the Baltic
states 2001– 2002, she won an award in Riga in 2000 called The Hope of
Photojournalism and took second prize in documentary photography in the Latvia
Photography Awards in 2006.
For her shoot on the border she used a Canon Eos-1D Mark II in natural light.
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