In 2011, the photographer Iveta Vaivode travelled east from her home in Riga, Latvia, to Pilcene, her family’s ancestral village. Although only one living relative remained in the tiny settlement, Vaivode found it strangely familiar. “Expressions, movements, even ways of thinking. I already knew so much of it, because I could see it in my mother and grandmother,” she said.

Vaivode returned to the village for each of the next three years, taking photographs for a series that she called “Somewhere on a Disappearing Path.” The project, which was recently awarded a prize by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, began as a family album but, over time, became an imaginative record of a disappearing community. (Many of the young people in Pilcene have left to find work in Western Europe; a disproportionate number of children and elderly remain.) Alexa Dilworth, … Read More »