In 2012, Iveta Vaivode(1979) went to her grandmother Antoņina’s village, Pilcene, in the Latgale region of Latvia. She was searching for the mythical place she imagined when looking through photographs of her grandmother’s youth. “For the most part, our lives aren’t connected anymore to one special place, a physical strip of land or old house our grandparents built. The ability to travel from one side of the world to the other, dynamically changing places of residence, and often travelling virtually as well as physically, has made our identities both more blurred and more unified. Getting to know the people of Pilcene, I had an odd feeling. Although they were strangers to me, I recognized something very familiar, but forgotten in them – the women of my family. Especially when Anna quietly asked me to listen to the singing of the … Read More »

The exhibition of works by Mary Ellen Mark (1940, USA) presents a classic documentary photography tradition in which photojournalism and subjective documentary align to and overlap each other. Her best-known series focus on socially vulnerable groups of people.

In terms of plots and themes, Mark’s works hint at the socio-critical perspective of her idol, William Eugene Smith. Formally, the works follow in the footsteps of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the principles of his decisive moment, in which it is easy to spot traces of a traditional art education – Mark studied painting, art history and photojournalism at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professionally, she has been working as a photographer since the mid-1960s, and has been publishing books since 1974 about cultural differences, the homeless, the ill and other fate-stricken people. Mark has collaborated with New York Times Magazine, Life, Paris-Match, The New Yorker, … Read More »

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 »