Projekt: In Europe

A photographic journey of “new” Europe.

Of the European Union’s 27 member states, 13 have joined in the past 20 years. Ten of those countries (Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) joined in May 2004, followed by Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 and Croatia in 2013.

The emergence of these countries as modern democracies is relatively recent, starting with a political movement initiated by striking dock workers in the Lenin Shipyard of Gdansk (1989) and rapidly spreading across the Eastern Block, ultimately leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991).

The nations and peoples of “new” Europe are, of course, anything but new - they all have political, social, and economic histories that go back many generations regardless of borders or membership in multi-national blocks. What is new is the vibrance in which these societies have embraced change, leveraging the EU’s freedoms of goods, services, capital and people to reshape their ambitions, economies and politics. Visible signs of this are found in the architecture and built environment of cities as well as in how people interact with those places and spaces.

To mark 20 years of this enlargement for so many of it’s citizens, I set off on a journey - with the help of a Wizz Air membership that gets me almost free flights for a year - to photograph a representative city, often the capital, of each countries of “new” Europe…

(Coming Soon)