Liza Faktor about this assignment

There's a great feeling in those pictures, of weird hope and translucency despite the circumstances, very Georgian indeed.
You told us before you are about to hit the villages and small towns, but it would be great to know the places and occupations of these young people. Also the time it took you to produce this. Keep up this work, its got great potential.

Michael Regnier about this assignment

I very much liked reading your comments about the lack of "subculture" for many young people who live in smaller towns and villages in more isolated parts of the world and their heroism (maybe patriotism?) for staying where they are, even if the cause is often lack of money. This is a fascinating world which is easy to forget for people living in cities who think that everybody lives in cities since cities are so all-consuming! The work in b/w is very fitting for this because it shows a more 'traditional world', a world away from the neon lights and the modernity of the city. Are you focusing on young people when you travel around anyway?

I think this is a work which you could expand upon, maybe with detailed interviews of these people, maybe asking them about political events in their environments/countries like the recent war in Georgia, which will have affected young people in a very specific way in Georgia?

David Meskhi about this assignment

Young people - the main theme and I’m always interested in different cultures of young people. But the idea to put them together and make the series about “small town youth” came to my head only during this workshop. I had some pictures made at different times in different places, including the capital of Georgia - Tbilisi, as well as the issue of small town exists in a capital too. This series have been completed and there are about 20 frames in it. It have been completed because the black and white film is not available here sometimes. So I had to shoot in color often. But in this trip the youth was not an end it itself. When I started this journey I began to shoot everything that affect me, without a plan. So I casually went to little village of refugees and then I went to several border villages. Watching scanned negatives now, I had the idea to make a series: the conflict zone - landscapes and details. I already have pictures from the border with Abkhazia and Armenia. I’m going to visit the border with Ossetia in the next trip. But other than that, I still have pictures of the villages on the border with Turkey. So maybe I will made the series about border towns and villages, not focusing on the conflict zone.

About mini-interview - it is quite possible, as I communicate with enough peoples from my images and I have all contacts of them. I have an idea to reshoot them when they grow up and see is their hopes dashed or not, and how they live their adult life. Whether they have that they want and what they dreaming about. Also I’m going to make a series about sport-schools where are no basic conditions for training, but despite this the sportsmen have some achieving, but it is still a plan.