Fujifilm/penumbra foundation internship program | 2025
Return to Vietnam | Nina Berman
Digitized by Clara Kraus
Image © Nina Berman. Courtesy of the artist.
“Return to Vietnam was made over a few weeks in 1987 when I was just beginning my professional career. I was working as a print reporter assigned to accompany a group of US veterans who had fought in Vietnam and were returning as civilians…. While the trip was often present in my consciousness, the pictures themselves remained mainly unseen and dormant, slowly decaying in a tattered three ring binder in my closet. That someone was offering to digitize it all was such a tremendous gift.”
- Nina Berman
Images © Nina Berman. Courtesy of the artist.
Photographer Nina Berman with intern Clara Kraus digitizing Berman’s slides at Penumbra’s GFX Digitization System.
“Working closely with Nina Berman’s Return to Vietnam reshaped my understanding of what it means for photographs to live beyond their moment of capture. Archives like hers remind me that images are not just evidence of the past– they are agents in the present, capable of being reinterpreted, reactivated, and recirculated across generations.
Without programs like this, who knows how long it would take, or if works like Nina’s would be revisited, preserved, and brought into public dialogue again.”
-Clara Kraus
Artist Bio:
Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist and educator. Her work explores American politics, militarization, environmental issues and post violence trauma. She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, (Trolley, 2004) portraits and interviews with wounded American veterans, Homeland, (Trolley, 2008) an examination of the militarization of American life post September 11, and An autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer, 2017) a story told with a survivor of sexual violence which was shortlisted for both the Aperture and Arles book prizes. Additional fellowships, awards and grants include: the Gugggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, the Open Society Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the Aftermath Project. Her work has been exhibited at more than 100 international venues from the Whitney Museum Biennial to the concrete security walls at the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan. Public collections include the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of the City of New York, the Harvard Art Museums and the Bibliothèque nationale de France among others. She has participated in workshops around the world for young photographers and is a professor at Columbia Journalism School where she directs the photojournalism/documentary photography program.
Intern Bio:
Clara Kraus is a Hawai‘i-born, New York-based photographer and BFA candidate at Parsons School of Design. Her work often blends self-portraiture with constructed or natural environments to explore themes of memory, identity, and place.
Rooted in a tactile, hands-on process, she uses the camera to examine relationships—between herself and loved ones, between body and place, between the truth of a moment and the fiction of how we remember it. She is particularly interested in how identity is shaped through connection, and how performance can surface emotional truths.
Her work holds space for contradiction: presence and absence, love and pain, memory and imagination. Through image-making, she explores not only what she remembers, but how she remembers—and how those recollections speak to where she comes from and who she is still becoming.
This program is possible thanks to the vision and support of Fujifilm.
Our Digitization System was made possible by a 2024 Capital Grant by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
