Travel 1st place winner

The five submitted photos are part of a continuing body of work begun in early 1990 and continuing into the present. It consists of a series of journeys through post communist Eastern Europe to explore the terrain of my early childhood and my ancestry. Since much of my family history was obliterated by the avalanche of WWII, the questions I grappled with were how to photograph an absence. The work is about travel, personal history, returning to my roots, transience and loss, metaphor and flashbacks. It’s about seeking symbolic ways to depict the bygone and the invisible; about telling open-ended stories that ask questions for which there are no easy answers.

Sylvia de Swaan is a Romanian born visual artist/photographer who has lived, worked and exhibited in Mexico, Europe and the United States. She moved from New Orleans to Central New York in the late seventies and has had a multitude of involvements in the region and beyond, – among them as an internationally exhibited practicing artist; founding director of Sculpture Space, Inc.; independent curator; advocate for the arts; visiting faculty in the art department at Hamilton College and Pratt Institute; and recipient of grants, fellowships and prizes from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Aaron Siskind Foundation, ArtsLink, Light Work, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Austrian Ministry of Culture, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Society for Photographic Education, Paris Photo, http://2015.odesa-biennale.org.ua/portfolio/sylvia-de-swaan/ https://www.worldphoto.org/blogs/20-09-16/make-meaningful-work-sylvia-de-swaan-visura