Belarusian Generation Y logbook

Photomania - the blog of a Belarusian 23-year old journalist Ksenija Avimava, got the title of the best blog according to the result of “Best of the Blogs” competition organized by Deutsche Welle which were announced earlier this week.
Ak-bara.livejournal.com became the first blog in Russian to win this competition. However, this was not text that impressed the jury the most, but the visual reflection of daily life in Belarus.

Gilles Klein, French member of the jury, said:

This blog presents Belarus – the country rarely covered by the international Media – without text which is useless in this case. I find it most attractive, since such a humane, warm and apolitical view gives a special aesthetics to the blog. This is a documentary piece of work. I don’t think that these black and white pictures have any critical message in them. The viewer can see daily routine with its ups and downs that every country has.

Most interesting is that Ksenija herself believes that her photo works are amateur. Probably that was also the secret of the success. Ksenija commented:

The blog is just a place for me where I put my amateur photos. That is something like a hobby to me. This is also a stimulus for me to make new photos. I think this is also the way it will remain in the future. I want to make better pictures and hope that among viewers of my blog there will be also critics who will advise me how to improve my photography. That would be really great!

Maybe this victory will help Ksenija to make her wish to become a photo-reporter come true.

I want to be a photo-reporter and the blog is just a place for training. I work as a journalist now and I want to change my specialization from writing articles to making reports in pictures. So the blog is connected with my professional plans

Until now Ksenija’s photos were published only once. That was her report from a concert 7 years ago.
Ksenija also commented the peculiarities of the Belarusian blog community:

Yes. There are very few independent newspapers and Internet resources in our country where people could express their opinion freely. And many bloggers – grown up people, older than 20 – have their own blogs. Many of these blogs have political content. Some Belarusian politicians also have online blogs at Livejournal to express themselves and possibly attract new supporters.

More than 7000 blogs participated in the competition of Deutsche Welle this year. The winners of the 4th BOBs competition can be found here.