United in Nature

Photos by Mikhail Galustov (left), Ian Shive (right)

What would a typical Afghan citizen picture when thinking of the United States? Probably not Yellowstone or the Tetons or the Snake River. Photographer Ian Shive took portraits of Afghans holding his 2009 coffee-table book The National Parks: Our American Landscape open to various pages.
 
"The idea started by accident," he said. "I had a friend who was going to Dubai, and she took a couple of copies of my book as gifts. She sent me back pictures of people looking at the books—college students. They told her that they'd never realized America looked this way. They thought it was all New York and Hollywood." (from Sierra Club article referenced below)

Shive calls this "wilderness diplomacy." http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201105/wilderness-diplomacy.aspx