Winners Archive 2022
Pavel Vavroušek Nová SedlicaStudio M Nedvěd
In 1971–1981 Pavel Vavroušek regularly photographed Nová Sedlica, the easternmost village of what was then Czechoslovakia. His photographs capture one of the very last islands of rural cohesion, a place where people lived their traditional lifestyles, differing little from the lives of their ancestors, in the rhythm of the changing seasons and Orthodox holidays. He took pictures in an environment as yet unaffected by unifying globalisation, selecting what was disappearing and endangered and recording it while still existed. The very last village. For the following four decades, these photographs were held in an archive.