In 1935, two Russian writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, came to the United States and did a 10,000-mile transcontinental road trip across America. The goal of their journey was to “find quintessential America” and to raise interest for this country among Soviet society. Their book, first published in the USSR in 1936 under the title Little Golden America, offered a satirical commentary on American life and showcased Ilf’s photographs taken with Leica camera. The book became one of the most popular non-fiction works ever published in Russia, and remains well-known today. My understanding of American life came from books like Ilf and Petrov’s and Hollywood movies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now though, twenty-five years after the collapse, I received a Fulbright Scholarship and have been working on a documentary photography project retracing Ilf and Petrov’s route 80 years later. My goal is to create a contemporary visual essay that provides a new look at modern American culture. As Ilf and Petrov wrote, “the sight of the street mob, the architecture of the buildings, the smell of the market, and finally the color peculiar only to that city, compose the traveler’s first and truest impressions.” As a photographer and photojournalist, my goal is to convey these impressions through images.