Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation Pushes the Boundaries: Partnership with the State University of New York at Buffalo

Despite the upcoming end of the semester, the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation still keeps inviting guests and partners.
Last week we welcomed Yola Monakhov Stockton, the Director of the photography program of the Department of Art & Design of the State University College at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA.
Yola’s life is truly fascinating. When Yola was seven, her family moved to New York, USA. After obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in Italian literature, Yola decided to engage herself in photography and started working as a military photojournalist for several popular magazines and photo agencies. Having been to a number of flashpoint areas in the Middle East, Yola decided to obtain a Master’s degree in photography and after that she started teaching photography at a number of US universities.
Within the framework of her visit to our university, Yola conducted several lectures and master classes. Despite our guest’s perfect Russian, she preferred speaking English, that’s why our MA students performed simultaneous and consecutive interpretation of the sessions that were attended not only by our university’s students but also by Astrakhan top-class photographers and photo amateurs. Yola spoke about teaching the art of photography in US universities and the academic mobility programmes. Her personal artistic journey and the importance of creating photo archives that can keep the history of ages evoked a lot of interest among the listeners. Yola also explained how the camera can convey what a photographer wants to say to the rest of the world. Besides, Yola gave a number of practical classes where she showed the guests the principles of taking photos with a large-format camera. The students and photographers could take on the role of models and ask the expert some questions.
All the guests and Yola herself were very excited. She was amazed by our city’s uniqueness and by hospitability of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation. Yola is looking forward to seeing us again and we hope that her visit will become a starting point of long and fruitful cooperation!