Nowadays, the time rushes past us more quickly, characterised by every time more intense and flashy stimuli, attacking our sense, and suppressing the images so common for previous generations. We seem to abandon the understanding of who we used to be and how we used to live. Fortunately, there still are the last places where the lapse of time is slower and allows us to capture our heritage, its fading or transformation.

Experience the sensitive approach applied by Miro Miklas in his series of documentary photographs with social themes, meant to capture the images of quickly and irretrievably vanishing Slovak villages. The photographer invested a lot of time to relations with the locals and is able to gently and naturally find his way to the inhabitants of a small half-forgotten Carpathian village called Dobrá Voda. To document their changing work, leisure time activities and traditional rituals. Miro saves a precious heritage which can clarify to our successors and us where our roots are, how used to be and how we used to live.

The photographs are not fragmented depictions of the old world deprived of the context. They rather show the reality, the real symbiosis of the old and the new, of several generations, the transformation brought by eras, taken from the life in the half-forgotten remote village Dobrá Voda in the heart of the Little Carpathian Mountains.

Changes have already found their way to the rural settings. Current Slovak villages are more anonymous and characterised by more individualism than before, fragmented to fenced gardens with artificial irrigation systems. The old village life may become a mere memory in few years‘ time. We cannot stop the progress; however, we are able to capture the changes for a better understanding of our roots. For us and the future generations.