Uncharted territory: photographer Liza Faktor explores the space between Siberian myth and reality

Liza Faktor is a New York-based, Moscow-born producer and curator working with documentary visual storytelling. The photos in this collection, Surfaces of Siberia, were taken over a seven-year period from 2001 and 2008. Faktor headed to Siberia to explore the gulf between perceptions and reality about the region known as Russia's wild west. "The huge mysterious territory of Siberia has been misunderstood not only by foreigners, but by people living in central Russia as well who still imagine bears wandering the streets and associate this place with exile and inhuman behaviour," she says. Instead, Faktor says she found a population that had "developed a beautiful relationship with the vast land that never feels or appears to be conquered, despite decades of pollution and ignorance." In 1999, Faktor co-founded online magazine Photographer.ru and in 2007, she launched the Objective Reality Foundation, an online project that provides training in photojournalism and multimedia. She has curated over 20 exhibitions in cities from from Moscow to Washington, and is the recipient of the Howard Chapnick Grant for photo editing.