With one another – Family pictures
Apart from portraying themselves, young people often turn to their personal environment. Children in particular tend at first to photograph their immediate surroundings. For children the first social system is the family, where they learn how to live together and to perceive themselves as individuals. For youths and young adults this means both proximity and separation.
Looking through the viewfinder helps children and young people to remain part of the family and at the same time to keep their distance. In this way they can create images which, though sparing nothing, show an inner bond with the subjects they photograph.
In the 1960s the prize-winning photographs can be seen mostly within the framework of traditional family pictures. The love between small children and parents is a particularly popular subject. In the following decades there is a change in both the contents of the photos and the pictorial language.
The step-by-step transformation of family life in our time has an impact on the pictures submitted. The concept of the family has constantly changed as a result of divorces, single parent households and patchwork families. The family circle is no longer seen exclusively as an idyllic retreat. More and more often the camera captures problematical situations in interpersonal relations.
The prize-winners also deal with existential topics. Old age, illness and the death of beloved persons are documented sensitively and with no taboos. Situations and emotions are recorded in an unbiased way. Cheerfulness and grief, security and loneliness, ingenuousness and rejection often lie very close together.
