![]() ![]() The idea of pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into something has not died with this generation. It is a release from the soul-crushing torture of school. I spend hours looking over manuals and tinkering, enjoying every second I can spend doing it. Many young men and women like myself have specific interests in the automotive field or want to work hands-on with something, I work on cars as a hobby with my father who taught me the ropes, but it’s grown into my passion. The mind-numbing and cookie-cutting process of modern education removes anything creative from our minds, and with the removal of shop classes by the older generations, the kids who have these skills struggle to prosper or find a passion in school. It is this alone that defines our intelligence, and from that our lives must be entirely in line by 18. We are held to high standards and forced to have our lives defined in 4 categories at school, and a grade from a 2-hour testing session at the end of the year. And sometimes those are the ones who dreamed the biggest. Those of us who you call lazy? Apathetic? A slacker? They are the ones who are, quite understandably, too scared or fell short in a world that looms over them more than ever. But we were also born into a world against our dreams - into a world where we have to fight and push to keep our dreams burning and unsmothered. We just don’t know what to do after that. We save our fortunes from fortune cookies, we live vicariously through Hollywood’s heroes, and we play games where we can try to be a hero as many times as we need. Believe me, we are trying.Īs we write our dreams onto paper boxes and release them to sea to wait for the universe’s response, it’s clear: we’re lost. And while they motivate and push us, there is a dark side to dreams: the more connected the world becomes, the more the world seems to grow and the more it grows, the more our already seemingly-small existence shrinks and the distance between us and our aspirations lengthens.īut despite all this, we still hold onto them closely and tenaciously. Please note: Artists’ statements have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Let us know what you think in the comments. We’re honoring 15 winners, 11 runners-up and 14 honorable mentions whose photos and accompanying artists’ statements impressed us most. Photos that clearly used filters or editing software to, for example, selectively apply color, blur some of the field, or otherwise manipulate objects and people, had to be eliminated no matter how much we loved them.Īnd now, on to the photos we did choose. One finalist described his image from a climate change march this way: “We are tired of our elders running into dead ends when it comes to change, so we have taken it upon ourselves to be the force behind a movement.”Īn important note before we show you our winners: This year we had to disqualify many images because they did not follow our rules. “We become so focused on the future that we forget how to be people, forget we are people.”Īnd yet, in image after image, from all over the United States, from Turkey, Switzerland, South Korea and Hong Kong, they also showed us they have fierce beliefs that they are passionate about defending. “It’s drilled into our minds from a young age that there’s a strict pattern to success that must be followed,” another finalist wrote. But they also wanted us to know that, as one finalist put it, “being next to the teenage-adult border is not easy.” They are tired and overwhelmed, and the burden of trying to live up to expectations haunted these submissions. ![]()
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