The Shortlist of the Alfred Fried Photography Award 2015
Tolstoi
There is a town in Estonia with a street named after a famous writer. There is an old green wooden house, weather-worn by cold winters, with a veranda and decorated windows. In recent decades, situated between all the other rickety-looking houses and wooden sheds in Karlova, a former working class neighbourhood of Tartu, it has been home to young students and creative types, layabouts and loners.
Sometimes 16 people are living here. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. A rare lifestyle in Estonia and for many of them just a brief station. Almost no one lives here for more than a few years before carrying on, dreams want to be lived, aims reached, always there will be this moment, when even the most professional slacker can’t stand it anymore. There is no residents' committee and the garbage is not separated for recycling. Community is not planned - it just happens.
After half a century as part of the Soviet Union and the reclaimed Estonian independence in 1991, the young generation grows up among the Soviet legacy and a society affected by Western European values.
While the economy is booming and many European states look with envy at the comparatively tiny debt of the country, the euro introduced and little Estonia, with its image as the high-tech, enthusiastic Baltic Tiger, becomes a politicized role model, the wages and opportunities for job training still remain low. Many young Estonians go abroad, so many that the problem of migration is perceived as a serious threat to the future development of societies.
Tolstoi is a place where all this is hardly talked about. It is as if you would ignore all that and people try to create their own modest but smoothly going universe. But still - I wonder if there suddenly are different ideals and visions of a fulfilled life for some young people in Europe, in which money is important – but wealth takes on a different meaning.
There is a town in Estonia with a street named after a famous writer. There is an old green wooden house, weather-worn by cold winters, with a veranda and decorated windows. In recent decades, situated between all the other rickety-looking houses and wooden sheds in Karlova, a former working class neighbourhood of Tartu, it has been home to young students and creative types, layabouts and loners.
Sometimes 16 people are living here. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. A rare lifestyle in Estonia and for many of them just a brief station. Almost no one lives here for more than a few years before carrying on, dreams want to be lived, aims reached, always there will be this moment, when even the most professional slacker can’t stand it anymore. There is no residents' committee and the garbage is not separated for recycling. Community is not planned - it just happens.
After half a century as part of the Soviet Union and the reclaimed Estonian independence in 1991, the young generation grows up among the Soviet legacy and a society affected by Western European values.
While the economy is booming and many European states look with envy at the comparatively tiny debt of the country, the euro introduced and little Estonia, with its image as the high-tech, enthusiastic Baltic Tiger, becomes a politicized role model, the wages and opportunities for job training still remain low. Many young Estonians go abroad, so many that the problem of migration is perceived as a serious threat to the future development of societies.
Tolstoi is a place where all this is hardly talked about. It is as if you would ignore all that and people try to create their own modest but smoothly going universe. But still - I wonder if there suddenly are different ideals and visions of a fulfilled life for some young people in Europe, in which money is important – but wealth takes on a different meaning.
