A good twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Europe is politically and economically united, and yet a cultural gulf remains between East and West. There are many reasons for this. A major one is the widespread consensus in the West that, in the post-communist era, the Eastern European societies are occupied more with overcoming their socialist past than with developing new processes. The fact is, however, that in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe a new generation (of photographers, for example) has now taken the stage whose biographies are surely marked by the upheavals around 1989, but who can no longer be described as post-communist. The members of this generation have left the disorientation of the transition process behind them and today live intensively in the here and now of a globalized world. This book is being published as part of the 31st Bielefelder Fotosymposium and presents a variety of artistic positions awaiting discovery and comparison.
