Cultural Practices

In an old photo from a family album, I am in a striped sweater with a cat in my arms and out of focus. Focus is on the calendar behind me — with peacocks and flowers — for 1995 and 1996. So I am about nine years old, and the photo was taken during the summer school holidays in the village of Kinelahta. I can’t remember much from that time, only a few things: a red horse on wheels, how it neighs when you pull the cable; plastic palm trees with bananas and monkeys; dried pike head, my grandfather’s fishing trophy. I remember how my father and I went fishing on the lake and, scooping up water in my boots, walked home. I remember the smell of the forest I walked through and the blueberry lips at the end of the walk. After the outbreak of the war, I decided to go to Kinelahta again. My trip was an escape from what is happening, an escape from the crowd, an attempt to forget myself in the memories of a carefree childhood. Now, as a father, I went to the countryside with my ten-year-old son. I captured the time we spent together on my camera, our distant relatives, places and objects that used to be important for me and the changes that have happened to them. In his book The Story of a German, Sebastian Hafner writes that the world has not noticed the abundance of escapist literature written in Germany between 1934 to 1938. Then, against the backdrop of pogroms, processions and the construction of defense plants, deliberately sentimental stories about summer holidays, first love and water meadows poured onto the shelves of bookstores. I can’t help feeling similar to what these authors felt, while I still live In Russia, when the future is saturated with anxiety and I increasingly turn to my serene past.

Finalist

Between Two Lakes

Alexander Sharr
Independent/Russia

Alexander Sharr was born in St. Petersburg in 1987. Graduated from the St. Petersburg faculty of photojournalism in 2011. He is currently studying at the Docdocdoc School of Contemporary Photography.

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