High Hopes

High Hopes
Vitus Saloshanka
Self-Published
English, German

Text by Daniel Schierke

83/150 edition

Softcover
96 pages
220 x 330 mm

2013

High Hopes is the result of a three-year critical study of Sochi, a city that hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014, and the process of transformation and change that took place the three years before the games. The title is an allusion to the ambitious goals and high expectations that come with the Olympic Games. The Olympics however play only a marginal role. Much more important is the question of the younger generation and their view of the future. The mixture of ease and gloom – Sochi’s inner conflict – pervades Saloshanka’s work, radiates from his photographs. The book’s tour de force is in the way it manages to excavate fragments of stories even in a place whose history in only a few years is being completely eradicated.

About the Artist

Vitus Saloshanka (b. 1974, Minsk) is a Belarussian photographer. From 2004 to 2009 he studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund. His work has been exhibited widely. In 2012 he received a Dummy Award at the Photobook Festival in Kassel, previously he received a grant from VG Bild-Kunst in 2011. Since 2009 he has been working as a freelance photographer.