After a short tour of the Soviet Union in 1989 Oppenheimer soon returned to Leningrad to study Russian for a year at the University of Leningrad. Impressed by the events unfolding in the Soviet Union in 1991, he moved to Moscow in 1992 and found work as a photographer for Kommersant, one of the new generation of newspapers to appear on the wave of Perestroika. In Moscow he studied photography with . During the 1990s he also worked freelance for several leading western publications and photo agencies, such as "Time" magazine, "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "Fortune", "Stern", "Sunday Times", "The Independent", Black Star, and Sipa Press.