Winners of the Alfred Fried Photography Award 2015
Downshifting in Belarus
Downshifting is a social trend in which individuals escape consumerism and move away from big cities and industrial centres to the countryside. Generated mostly by environmental, social and housing problems, downshifting has been gaining more and more strength in Belarus. The villages Chereshlia and Plissa in the Novogrudok region of the Grodno area have become a social refuge for young families with minimal dependence on the state. Jury statement: Today the dominant collective rational agreement is that everybody is responsible for everybody. A fragile balance of deterrence prevails, inspired by agony. Discord leads to divisions, violence, injustice, class war, to social strata opposing each other, to ecologic sins, economic exploitation, to excess without a sense of proportion. Everybody strives to gain status just for themselves. Ideals, values and visions are subordinated to the God of mammon. But there is another way, as Hamburg-based Ukrainian photographer Dimitrij Leltschuk shows. He visualized the trend of an increasing number of people resisting capitalism and inhuman utilitarianism and searching for alternative forms of living. This can mean retreating to the country, as Leltschuk demonstrates. The people in his pictures deliberately go for reduction. They search for happiness in a simple life. Peace, in a consumer society based on compromises and fear, in reality starts with small things: gestures, thoughtfulness, acceptance. The magic words are independence and freedom.
Downshifting is a social trend in which individuals escape consumerism and move away from big cities and industrial centres to the countryside. Generated mostly by environmental, social and housing problems, downshifting has been gaining more and more strength in Belarus. The villages Chereshlia and Plissa in the Novogrudok region of the Grodno area have become a social refuge for young families with minimal dependence on the state. Jury statement: Today the dominant collective rational agreement is that everybody is responsible for everybody. A fragile balance of deterrence prevails, inspired by agony. Discord leads to divisions, violence, injustice, class war, to social strata opposing each other, to ecologic sins, economic exploitation, to excess without a sense of proportion. Everybody strives to gain status just for themselves. Ideals, values and visions are subordinated to the God of mammon. But there is another way, as Hamburg-based Ukrainian photographer Dimitrij Leltschuk shows. He visualized the trend of an increasing number of people resisting capitalism and inhuman utilitarianism and searching for alternative forms of living. This can mean retreating to the country, as Leltschuk demonstrates. The people in his pictures deliberately go for reduction. They search for happiness in a simple life. Peace, in a consumer society based on compromises and fear, in reality starts with small things: gestures, thoughtfulness, acceptance. The magic words are independence and freedom.