Birgit Püve is a photo artist currently based in Tallinn, Estonia.
Since she started working on long-term projects, her work has won several awards. In 2012, the picture editors of The Sunday Times Magazine and Spectrum, UK, named Birgit the Spectrum Emerging Talent 2012 (with her series "Estonian Documents"). The initiative was launched to seek out today’s freshest photography.
In 2014, she won the 3rd Prize at The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize organized by The National Portrait Gallery in London and was selected as an exhibitor at The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2015. Lately, she was selected as a nominee at PDN's 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch 2016 in New York, USA.
Her works have been published in publications such as The Washington Post, TIME Lightbox, Monocle, PDN Magazine, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and L'Express, among others.
As a photo artist, she concentrates on the presentation of human nature. With her series "By The Lake" she portrays the silent and dignified world of the Russian Old Believers living in the culturally unique part of Estonia, on the shores of Lake Peipus, the biggest transboundary lake in Europe, which now separates two different worlds – the European Union and the Russian Federation. "By The Lake" consists of poetic diptychs of people and their private environments.
Her first monograph "Elada mitmuses/Double Matters" (in Estonian with an English summary), portraying more than 80 identical twins and triplets living in Estonia, was published in winter 2013.
This haunting series of portraits explores the effects of enduring life in a still-struggling Eastern European nation 20 years after the Soviet Army left the country.
On the border between East and West, Europe and Asia, Catholicism and Orthodoxy—these portraits from an almost forgotten village in Estonia offer a window into the past, into a culture that has all but vanished.
Hea Lugu