Come here, Youth, come here!
Here is a new rise in the morning,
A picture of truth hitherto unknown,
Doubt and clouds of reason,
Disputes for the delight of the crowd -
Behold, they have unraveled. Madness is a dark forest,
It's a maze of maddeningly tangled roots.
How many have fallen there! What they should care about,
They do not know; in the darkness they stumble over their bones
The dead in this desert.
And although they themselves do not know the way,
They want others to follow them.
William Blake, The voice of a former poet
Photography in Poland is changing dynamically all the time. On the art scene debut no longer the vintages of the '70s, but the '80s and even the '90s. The image and ways of seeing, which ten years ago were a discovery, today seem as if from another era. The fierce disputes around artistic and documentary photography, which were fought not long ago, now sound a barely audible echo.
I would like to devote this text to a phenomenon that has been present on the Polish scene for a relatively short time, as yet undefined - rather intuitively intuited. It is about photographic vision, which, starting from the experience of a document, transcends it, creating a kind of subjective, intimate story with an artistic (and not strictly documentary) dimension. It can take the shape of an exhibition in emerging galleries, a debutant show as part of any of the photography festivals, but also be posted online: on the World Wide Web, Tumblrs or patchwork blogs.
Lech Lechowicz once wrote about the privatization of the photography of the generation of young people debuting around 1989. Meanwhile, people who were born around the time of the regime change are coming to the fore before our eyes. They know no other realities than capitalist ones; they are admittedly individualists, but surprisingly they have a lot in common. They also join together on their own - in collectives and informal coalitions. For me personally, the topic was first signaled by Aleksandra Sliwczynska-Kupidura when she published her Summary of 2010. In a short text, she mentioned a number of blogs, browsing and then following them was the first step in contacting and trying to understand the phenomenon. Sliwczynska-Kupidura developed her intuitions in subsequent issues of "Quarterly Photography," presenting, almost without comment, photographs by young artists.
At first sight, to a person familiar with the history of the medium, new photography may seem not so "new" again. Many motifs characteristic of the work of the youngest generation can be found in the work of "old" predecessors. These more or less conscious similarities may irritate and annoy, but they do not change the fact that, on the whole, something different is beginning to happen, and whether it is more interesting and exciting remains to be seen. Each new quality impinges on the perception of events and phenomena already past, of artists still active, but already generationally situated in a different place than the debutants. After all, it seems interesting, having in mind the achievements of artists such as Georgia Krawiec, Barbara Sokołowska, Magdalena Hueckel, Anna Orlikowska, Katarzyna Majak, Patrycja Orzechowska, Monika Wiechowska or Dorota Buczkowska, to find a new quality in art. differentia specifica the work of younger artists and artists. At this point, I must confess to a fascination with the category of "the uncanny" (German: "uncanny"), which is key to the new photography and was derived from Sigmund Freud. das Unheimliche), to which I devoted one of the halls of the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in an exhibition organized in 2008 The red-eye effect. Polish photography of the 21st century. The works collected at the time - including those by Orlikowska, Buczkowska, Wiechowska, Sokolowska, but also by Maciej Stępinski, Oskar Dawicki, Nicolas Grospierre, Szymon Rogiński, Jan Smaga and Aneta Grzeszykowska, or the Magdalena Wunsche-Agneska Samsel duo - touched on a subject that was yet to develop in earnest. Or maybe it was precisely not? Maybe the experience of the boundaries of the normal and the uncanny is fuller in the oeuvre of the aforementioned artists, and what is presented today as "new" and "young" is just a meager repetition, an empty echo, a formal game and one not-so-great misunderstanding? Probably, one could even make an exhibition on the subject, but perhaps it would be better first to take a closer look at photography itself, write a text and try to confront the photographic avant-garde, that is, to perform - sticking to military rhetoric - a reconnaissance of the terrain by battle.
Michal Bugalski, Survival forms
TENDERNESS, VULGARITY, SURFACE
Some kinds of love
Margarita told Tom
like a dirty French novel
combines the absurd with the vulgar
and some kinds of love
the possibilities are endless
and for me to miss one
would seem to be groundless
Excerpt from Velvet Underground song Some Kind of Love announcing the exhibition Vulgar Witek Orski
Some believe that it all started with the Czułość gallery, founded in 2010, understood broadly as a meeting place, exhibition space, "hardy house", aesthetic disposition, philosophy of photography and social constellation. However, Czułość, founded on the initiative of Witek Orski and Jan Zamoyski, is first and foremost an independent gallery of young photography: "When we say that we deal with young photography, then - contrary to appearances - we are not concerned with photos taken by children. In fact, we are not concerned with the age of the artists at all. Rather, it's about the freshness of their works. The authors we show and want to show are young in the sense that the basis of their photographic experience was the Internet, Western and Far Eastern (Japan) albums, magazines or (photo)blogs. These are people who do not think of themselves as continuing polish school of photography. Rather, their obvious starting point is the Bechers, Goldin, Shore, Araki, Wall. This is a special kind of contemporary photography, which is not only created today, but is created with an awareness of the current global context. When we look at the portfolios that are sent to us, we see how much the higher schools of art photography do wrong - they cut out context awareness and force students into an artificial, contrived discourse polish fine art photography".
Breaking with local tradition and emphasizing affinities with the global canon is combined - paradoxically - with an emphasis on "freshness." However, the authors of Tenderness run the risk that, while being as fresh as possible in the Polish context, they may at the same time be epigones of the global mainstream. This affliction is well demonstrated in "zine-pack", which consists of author's books by, among others, Kuba Ryniewicz, Weronika Ławniczak, Stanisław Legus, Katarzyna Maniak, Kamil Zacharski, Paweł Eibel, Janek Zamoyski, Witek Orski... The gods of Western photography stroll through the world of young Polish photographers, populate it and feel at ease, and reading the subsequent zines is accompanied by a growing feeling of déjà vu. Young, half/nude girls caught in a dynamic frame, unreal fragments of student material culture, out-of-focus, flash-exposed images are just vernacular stylization; on top of that, the vivid views of unspecified urban, suburban and rural spaces, which add up to a rather unified message, in which everything is mixed up and looks as if it was done not by a collective, but by a single, but well acquainted with "Bechers, Goldin, Shorem, Araki, Wallach" artist. The virtual photographer seems tired of Polish art, Polish winter and autumn, everyday life, as if on a slight hangover, moral and alcoholic, after (or just before) sex, after (or just before) a session/diploma. Sensitivity is the photographic equivalent of the phenomenon of "reality fatigue" recognized in Polish art. A kind of escapism, a strong styles. Sensitivity is often accused of being "hipster" and "Warsaw-ish," whatever that means. But the founders don't care about these epithets, because, they declare, their gallery "is brazen, trying to bypass corporate rules, striving for personal and creative freedom. We don't want vernissages where people drink wine, look and leave. We make it into parties. The idea is to make people stay longer, get drunk, whatever. What happens at our place is supposed to be authentic and correspond with their lifestyle. This makes photography the subject of a laid-back and authentic conversation. Also important for us is the aspect of devaluing art, taking it off its pedestals. Art is not confined to the hermetic space of a museum or the detached enclave of a palace. It remains in a natural, close relationship of creators, space and audience."
At the same time, the naturally laid-back, anti-academic but establishment sensibility is rapidly becoming commercialized. The collective's participants talk directly about the market, about collecting, about editions of works and zines, about production and distribution, about fairs, bargains and careers.
If one evaluates the exhibitions - not events - organized in Tender, then among those organized so far, two stood out (or rather, were the most peculiar): Witek Orski's Vulgar and Kamil Zacharski Middle Surface (both organized in 2012).
Witek Orski is certainly no ordinary artist, and his art perversely plays with the definition of the word "vulgar" given in the press materials: gross, indecent, obscene, inappropriate, devoid of subtlety, taste, oversimplified, shallow, from Latin. vulgaris - from vulgus: the people, the crowd, the mob. The subversive title - if it refers to artistic content and form - also hooks into the nature of photography, which "is today a universal language, more universal than the word - global, simple, fast and impressionable." Constructed from a variety of works, the exhibition piles up possibilities of reception in front of the viewer, as if contesting the author's diagnosis that "the photographic image seemingly does not require symbolic competence, is received holistically and gives an immediate understanding of the essence." Even for the most competent viewers at the exhibition by Orski, a philosopher by training, nothing is holistic or immediate. At the exhibition Vulgar understanding is gradually rather moving away, and the essence is disappearing.
"Taking vulgarity as his subject, Witek poses a question about these appearances, questions the literalness of the message in photography and the actual closeness in the relationship between the viewer and what is photographed. Showing photography as a medium that transcends the structures of language, he proves that through the practice of photography Dry can be at the same time Moist," one can read in the materials accompanying the exhibition. The exhibition consists of photographs of stones that look like meat, arranged in a two-story villa; blood-watered stones hang opposite an image of a grove at Birkenau and the evacuation instructions of the Auschwitz Museum, photos of exuberant girls and fooling boys next to hugging couples, photos of snow, exotic potted plants and a photograph of a window sill pasted on the wall - in turn, a black-and-white lightbox hangs next to a triptych dedicated, the author asserts, to Francis Bacon.
Orski's exhibition is an art "display", an exhibition of an exhibition where the intervals between photos, relationships, gaps, faults, splatters on the walls, the wainscoting in the vestibule and the stairs leading from floor to floor of the villa located in Saska Kepa, where Sensitivity is located, count as much as the photos. It is a work of specific arrangement, a photographic Gesamtkunstwerk 21st century. Orski declares that he worked on the exposition for almost a year. This is not coquetry, rather a sign of the times, a current mannerism. It's a contemporary definition of "sprezzatura": to polish every detail of the exhibition in such a way that the whole gives the impression of a lightweight construction, created as if from an unwillingness, perfect and immediate, but also difficult to verbalize, over which critics and commentators break their heads. Bownik writes: "The construction of the exhibition is based on tense melancholy and intellectual fascinations. Precisely constructed relations between photographs are broken by non-obvious motifs. Witek Orski's entire exhibition is an intellectual and emotional excursion." The helplessness of the critic, who is at the same time the author's senior colleague, is covered by the wry but strangely appropriate term "strained melancholy." Whatever it means, applied with great sensitivity, the play display Orski reminds us of the difficulties encountered by various Tumblr and blog followers. This not inconsiderable effort to translate the experience of the web into the experience of space not once ends in spectacular failure - such as in the case of Yulka Wilam, the prematurely discovered star of the 2011 Krakow ShowOFF.
Orski's exhibition, but also the activity of Tenderness itself, revolves around the basic question, which can be tried to formulate as follows: how to express the non-banality of individual existence, quite average, but unique at the same time, how to do it as tenderly as possible using such a vulgar tool as a camera and photo exhibition? Orski himself remains quite unpretentious in all this, he does not lose his distance, which has its charm. Orski talks about what he does as "lajfstyle photography," that is, related to life, style, being a manifestation and document of this lifestyle. In this way, as if out of the blue, the somewhat discredited notion of style returns to Polish photography.
Vulgar is a photograph taken for oneself, in a way for friends, also for an eternal souvenir of things, like a photographic family album, a bit nostalgic, but rather not analog, traditional, but "Instagram", "Tumblr" (even if analog was used for production, if you can say so, the impression remains digital). Here there can be no boredom of linear narrative, no "Bildungsreise", is to be a mélange and multiplicity of readings, a multiplicity of intersecting paths and tropes. The remarks under Orski can be freely applied to other photographers of the collective: Lena Dobrowolska, Bartłomiej Lurka, Paweł Eibel, Janek Zamoyski....
The photographer of Sensitivity who attracts attention is - next to Orski - Kamil Zacharski. Until recently, he was known for his photographs typical of the collective, representing a generational experience, sensitive frames of the city's nightlife interspersed with photos of attractive girls. Presented in the summer of 2012, the exhibition Middle Surface is if not a step into artistic maturity, then at least an entry into systematic work with a single, rather abstract motif. The motivation behind the young artist's change in approach is intriguing. In the opening text of the exhibition's accompanying zine, Zacharski declares: "When I started, I was very hungry for new paintings, I wanted to absorb as much as possible and couldn't stop. I would page through all the albums and magazines that came into my hands, convinced that even a quick glance at a photograph would be enough for me to learn something. However, looking at pictures is like learning to read fast - you may be able to turn the pages quickly, memorize what's on them, but then it turns out that you don't have the joy of discovering them at all because of it. I got tumblerosis without Tumblr. I felt that I had reached a wall. So I started looking, checking, revisiting things that I used to just browse through in a rushed, cursory way. I started studying the details, thinking longer about the form, and learning to interact with the photo rather than pass it by. I wanted to go into an intensive recording mode, and I realized that this also meant that I wanted someone to record my work in this way."
Zacharski decided to break with his previous emploi and presented a selection of works, quite densely hung and uniformly framed, depicting all sorts of motifs related to water, a river, a water pond, the surface of water, the bottom of a pond, silt, algae and lichen; he focused on reflections on the surface and a girl's knees, feet and a naked girl submerged in that water. The very setting and the almost calendar-like motif, one would like to say - kitschy - surprisingly cut off from the earlier trash Zacharski's attempts. Compared to Orsky, the author Middle Surface as if he hadn't mastered the demanding art of "display". The motifs collected on the first floor of the gallery were repeated in a not very intriguing way on the first and second floors. The photos framed in the same, rather simple way irritated, but also did not allow to forget themselves. The author himself distanced himself from the presented photos in a self-reflective text from the booklet accompanying the exhibition: "With all the awareness of the repetitive nature of images, of the fact that every photo can be exchanged for a similar photo of someone else, you know that you have some photos that cannot be faked, no one can copy them, nor can you repeat them. It's kind of like collecting cards and seeing who has more aces up their sleeve. [...] In the deck of my exhibition, in my opinion, there are two such completely unique cards. It's a photo that shows a sort of jagged gasoline stain - paradoxically the one most often dismissed by people who view this exhibition - and a photo of a single minimal flower floating in brown water. All the rest of the photographs can probably be signed that they are mcginley or different." Originality vis-à-vis the contemporary canon of photography (here, Ryan McGinley) seems to be of secondary importance, or rather, derived from the authenticity of the existential experience, and therefore - of photography. It doesn't make sense to do an exhibition of two photographs, but by showing a lot of photographs that are "awesomely pretty" (Witek Orski), Zacharski risks turning the exhibition, or rather the gallery, into a store out of sight. Another thing is that maybe that's the point. Jan Zamoyski, the gallerist of Tenderness, admits that ideally there would be amateurs of otherwise aesthetically pleasing motifs who would be willing to hang works in the proverbial law office among gallerists. Zamoyski says this without irony or malice, rather in encouragement. All the pictures are priced, numbered, some reserved, sold, and the price rises with the next copies in the series.
HANSEL AND GRETEL AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER NARRATIVES
Associated with every mental process is a value feature, namely. emotional tone. The tone shows the extent to which the subject has been stimulated by this process, that is, how much it matters to him (if the process has reached the subject's consciousness at all) The biggest difference is that technology and the internet has speeded everything up tremendously in just a few years. We take the instant transmission of photos and text for granted. As a photojournalist for 60 years, I well recall a different time when I would send packages of undeveloped rolls of film with hand written captions to editors all across the world. DHL and FedEx were vital for my international work, even the regular mail system on occasion. Then digital cameras and the internet came along, changing everything, and a lot more time had to be spent at the computer. Newspapers were the first to take advantage of the technology as they require a quick turnaround for news stories and photo quality was less demanding. It took longer for color magazines to adapt, the sort I worked with, who had to wait until digital photography improved. Online media didn't exist at all until relatively recently but it certainly didn't kill print media, as some predicted.
Carl Gustav Jung, Self
Dream catchers is the first exhibition at Warsaw's Lookout Gallery. Curated by Katarzyna Majak with the participation of a trio of artists (Sarah Wilmer, Alexander Binder and Julita Paluszkiewicz), the exhibition may not be entirely representative of Polish photography, but it is significant in many ways, building an international context for the functioning of photography created here and now. Significantly, Katarzyna Majak is an artist with an outstanding body of work, a critic, curator, educator, a person versed in international photography, and therefore has the potential to establish points of reference for the younger generation. The exhibition prepared by Majak for Lookout Gallery can be regarded, if not as a manifesto, then certainly as a kind of "statement" and for this reason alone it deserves attention.
If the title of the exhibition refers to the legacy of Surrealism, the curatorial choice of artists concretizes this reference. Katarzyna Majak situates Wilmer, Binder and Paluszkiewicz "at the antipodes of documentary art" and - citing the authority of Bernd Stiegler - writes of the "real hallucination" that the artists indulge in. "Perception, or more precisely the gaze, is a daydream, and the photographer, focused on the gaze, is the catcher of this dream," Majak writes. The transition from hallucination to daydream, to waking dream, in Majak's text is smooth, but looking at the artists' works one may wonder if it is not too smooth. Catching dreams by means of photography and video is a beautiful, fairy-tale association, but looking soberly - awake - it's hard not to wonder what the viewer actually sees? "The language of metaphors here is decidedly traditional, referring to romantic, esoteric, Surrealist inspiration," Majak says, and looking at the photographs we see perfectly executed, superbly staged, highly stylized and post-produced color photographs based on the well-recognized vocabulary of post-Surrealist art, though without absurd cruelties, shocking perversions or excessive ecstasy. These may not be toe-curling tropes, but it's certainly not revolutionary art either. No one will be offended here, the viewer will quite freely relate to the work and the artist ("offbeat," yes, but not crazy, not somnambulistic). If in Tenderness the gods are Araki, Goldin, Walll and McGinley, then for the "dream catchers" it is important to have a dialogue, as the curator notes, with Polanski, Argento, Lynch, Jodorowsky, Thoreau, Herzog, von Trier, Coleman and other theses of global visual culture. The photography seems original and intimate, but overall it is entangled in a web of emotional and intellectual links, borrowings. It's hardly hallucinatory, rather erudite, meta-textual and - an unfashionable word pushes on the lips - "postmodern." In other words, Dream catchers They fish in bodies of water that are already heavily overfished, but willy-nilly they still find something for themselves (and the public). On the other hand, it can be considered an image of photography's exhaustion, fatigue and exhaustion. "We are dealing with photography and video strongly imbued with symbolism," concludes the paragraph devoted to Majak's artistic dialogues. The associative nature of this photography even imposes itself. Looking at the photos is an endless game of associations, a pleasure of references:
"Photography and video in the case of the works of the 'dream catchers,' like our vision in general, does not so much record as evoke. What is evoked, in Wilmer's words, are "feelings, ideas, mystery, situations, people, the future and nature," writes Katarzyna Majak. This almost Borgesian, and certainly in the spirit of surrealism, list of evocations (can you evoke a mystery, the future?) inevitably leads towards the "story, myth" that we encounter in the works of the artists invited to the exhibition. According to the curator, "the artists' somnambulistic wanderings most often lead us towards the forest, a space laden with a rich baggage of meanings, certainly reaching much further into the past than the mysterious and ominous forest of Book I of the The Divine Comedyand Dante. Collective memory is intertwined here with personal mythology. Binder confesses in an interview with Fine Magazine: "As a child, I spent a great deal of time on the Black Forest moors, and many of my photographs capture the eerie and diffuse atmosphere of these enchanted places." So, no hallucination, no daydream, just an attempt to render, to reproduce long-gone moments; an attempt made not only sober, but also with Dante in mind. "Catching Dream" is a formal fantasy, a fable created by an adult about his own childhood. It's a bit infantile, but also pretty, not to say decorative. To this we can add that artists, after all, are not there to mature, they are rather to nurture childishness in themselves, the child in them they do not want to kill for anything. Eternal youth, eternal immaturity comes out of this. The fundamental problem of the creativity of these adult children seems to be the passage of time. The farther back to childhood, the harder it is to pick out something original. And on top of that, childhood is now photographed by the children themselves, teenagers who publish in galleries and magazines (again, Yulka Wilam and an ocean of Tumblrs). All thanks to the availability of the medium, one might add. Back to the Black Forest: "The forest appears in most of the exhibition's photos as a residuum of what is different, what escapes reason, consciousness, society. As such a place, it acquires an almost numinous character, becoming a terrain of sacrum. Entering the forest turns out to be a ritual. We find this fact, dressed in fairy tale forms, in the story of Hansel and Gretel and in a thousand other narratives." The question is whether the escape of adults into the forest of childhood could not produce more powerful works? Is there not too little Freud and Lacan here, and not too much numinous Jung and children's fairy tales (that's already Bettelheim, perhaps)? Infantilization of art can lead nowhere. It is good that the curator is aware of this risk: "Admittedly, not all paths lead back to the open, and not all catchers surface. There are signs that reveal the secret, and there are misleading clues that lead astray."
Much has been written about photography's relationship with film, poetry and literature. The above quotes may suggest the need to add a chapter to the history of the medium on the relationship of photography to psychotherapy (adult and children). Arguably, photography could serve as an aid to therapy, a form or medium of self-therapy. If only taking photos allows what are more sensitive individuals to function better in society, then this practice should absolutely be encouraged, but there is also no need to delude ourselves that the intensely reliving of their subjectivity photographic gallerists of sensitivity have some special abyss to reveal to us. Ot, childhood in the Black Forest area (that's not Combray, though). Only one more question needs to be asked (actually, this is suitable for a therapist, but a critic can ask it too), namely, why do they actually "do it"? It's decadent - after all, it's not for sale either, you can't make a living out of it. Binder costs a pittance even for Polish conditions, a few hundred zlotys for a work of art, others are a little more expensive, but not much. What is this photography for? And for whom?
There may be more questions. It is better to treat the exhibition as a contribution to a broader diagnosis of the state of the medium. Katarzyna Majak: "For the works of artists in the exhibition Dream catchers can be viewed as a metaphor for an experience in which it is impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, so much does one resemble the other." The curator goes on to write about a "peculiar revelation" - "it could be a blade of grass, a leaf, a fragment of a wall, which we wouldn't pay attention to on a daily basis, but when it is given to us so vividly and phenomenally, the impression of illumination becomes irresistible." Well, exactly, the problem is that it is only an impression, not an illumination. And is it true that "every detail of visible reality can undergo such a dazzling metamorphosis"? Going back to the example of the unabashed surrealists, such as such Bataille, one can say brutally that torture, crime and coprophagia are unlikely to undergo this metamorphosis, no matter what.
The curator gradually begins to suspect something: "The artist's gaze thus fixed in the frame, this "real hallucination", a dream on waking, is not less, but more real than skimming over the surface of phenomena. The inner dream remains in harmony with the outer world, while at the same time it is so far away from it that it can only be reached by dream catchers and, of course, anyone who follows their footsteps." For skimming over the surface ("middle surface", Zacharski would say), however, we don't need any catchers. It is enough to look around - on our own. It's not even necessary to take photographs.
SUM UNEQUAL TO THE DIFFERENCE
Why, then, should we waste our time on books that the author clearly did not write from m u s u?
Georges Bataille, Sky blue
Exhibition Sum Is Equal to the Difference curated by Katarzyna Maniak and Patrycja Musiał collected names "that are talked about": from Witek Orski and Krzysztof Pacholak, through Aleksandra Loska and Magdalena Kmiecik, to Dawid Misiorny and Piotr Bekas. The exhibition at the No Local foundation in Cracow, later moved to Galeria Szara in Cieszyn, actually could have been a manifesto of young photography, but it wasn't - the exhibition passed almost without an echo. Maybe this was due to the haste in working on the show, maybe to poor promotion, which was in contrast to the media hype surrounding the anniversary edition of the overwhelmingly large Month of Photography, in whose accompanying program the Maniak and Musial exhibition took place. But the reasons for the disappointment can also be sought in the construction of the exhibition itself. Undoubtedly, the curators had a difficult task to put together, out of a dozen uncommon photographers, in one medium-sized room, an exhibition that is coherent and at the same time reflects the diversity of the attitudes presented. Each of the authors not only has an original sensibility and brilliant stories to tell, but also "strong cards" in their portfolios, to invoke Zacharski's term. However, although many of the participants showed really great pictures (Loska, Misiorny, Ławniczak, Orski), it was not possible to create enough tension between them. It also slipped "display" exhibition. In other words, quite strong photographs did not add up to a strong exhibition. Perhaps this was due to the curators' assumption that they present photography-art in a time of hustle and massification, which, as it were, involuntarily imposes a form of working with the author and the work, and also gives a framework to the exhibition; a framework that the authors - as described in the example of Tenderness - try if not to destroy, then at least to heavily rework. Characteristic is the very curatorial "statement": "Is it possible to create an image of many images? The exhibition, built from individual and subjective frames of reality, attempts to present young Polish photography - the work of the vintages of the '80s. It presents visual artists who are united by years of birth, and different ways of looking at and interpreting the world. Photography, while fighting for the status of art, had to respond to accusations reducing its role to mechanical, even thoughtless registration. Today, the challenge is the spread of the medium and its mass use, the production of images has become a social practice, a tool for communication and interaction. We look for answers and comments on the status of photography-art today in the work of artists and their photographic images."
Maniak and Musial's text seems grossly inadequate to the problems troubling young artists. The deluge, the chaos, the indiscriminate use of the medium, the struggle for the status of a work of art - this is not what carries the authors exhibited in No Local. In fact, they themselves distance themselves from it, taking advantage of the opportunity given to them by the curators themselves, submitting a questionnaire to be filled out, published in the publication accompanying the exhibition. To the question "What is the place of photography-art today: with its diffusion and massification" they answer evasively, or do not answer at all, shifting the burden of reflection to other tracks. A handful of examples of building distance from the curatorial concept. Krzysztof Pacholak: "Umassification doesn't bother me. Ever since I can remember, I have been hearing the lament that art (photography) is losing out to such wide dissemination. That flooding us with thousands of photographs every day is evidence of the decline of culture. I read this state of affairs quite differently." Piotr Niepsuj: "In all likelihood, art has never been more useless than it is today." Witek Orski: "Photography is a non-special and non-unique tool of communication." One of the more interesting responses to the curatorial survey was provided by Bartek Lurka, who wrote: "It is not necessary to travel to the end of the world and spin grand narratives. It is necessary to tell about things close to us. By being private and personal, photography becomes much more interesting and real. Thanks to this kind of thinking, in the mass of photos flooding us every day, from all sides, each of us finds something close to him and his heart in it. Photography not only depicts reality. It is also a medium of universal as well as symbolic nature." Even if with this universality and symbolism Lurka exaggerated, it is still a good indication of the direction of reflection of the authors participating in the Sum Is Equal…
The gap between curatorial assumptions and photographic practice is one thing, and another is the sometimes startling difference between the authors' thinking and the photographs they take, by them. Sometimes it resembles jokes like "deadpan humor", as in the case of Aleksandra Loska presenting in No Local one of her more powerful, slightly erotic photographs, showing the torso of a young, slim, naked, depilated girl in trickles of white liquid. The commentary on her own works included in the catalog states that the artist "focuses on depicting the human condition, relying on images of her carnality," and for this she "often uses the help of figurative and symbolic imagery." Instead of a commentary, one can quote the first and last sentence of Loska's answer to the question posed by the curators: "It is obvious that photography poses a problem [...], photography has everything in it. Photography poses a problem."
The possibility of overcoming the difficulties or even the impossibility of creating a satisfactory - for the time being - project presenting the achievements and defining the specifics of the youngest photography can be sought in initiatives from the border of the Internet, self-publishing and authorial galleries like Czułość, but also as part of institutionalized entities like the Month of Photography in Krakow. Simultaneously with the exhibition at No Local, another ShowOff continued in May, where several venues also featured authorial statements by artists associated with the aesthetics of new photography: Dawid Misiorny, Lena Dobrowolska and Łukasz Rusznica. Only in an intimate solo exhibition can one see a glimpse of genius or a fall into photographic banality and kitsch.
Among the most talented artists of the generation is Dawid Misiorny, who presents himself as interested in philosophy (the previously mentioned Witek Orski has a master's degree in philosophy and is trying on a doctorate). Misiorny at the exhibition WYSIWYG presented a handful of motifs at first glance familiar to fans of new photography. Some girls and guys, cities and curios, nature mixed with tightly framed details - things. There's also a lot of street photography. However, Misiorny stands out from the eclectic company by being concrete. The author is more focused on a single image. He doesn't overbuild any extra levels. WYSIWYG is, after all, the English abbreviation for "What You See Is What You Get". In free translation, "you get exactly what you see." The author himself describes the concept of the exhibition and its accompanying publication in the following words: "WYSIWYG is a conscious attempt to restore to photography the character of a phenomenon, the power of the visible thing, to emphasize the photogenic nature of bodies and images. It emphasizes the "visibility" of photographed objects, going beyond the mechanical process of light passing through the lens and common registration. WYSIWYG is neutral - it is not limited to the realm of imagination. He is not conservative and does not cling to the crafted themes. He cultivates art by adding a touch of magic to his images, which are emanations of common and well-known visible things." The magic of the commonplace may not sound like much, but Misiorny's photos show the effects of sensitive observation. These photos are movement, dynamics, surprising composition, originality. Misiorny seemingly tells the story of a generation - like all the rest - but the point is like it does. One can say, following Buffon, that style is everything. In Misiorny's case, it's more like style.
With Misiorny and his curators - Zuza Krajewska and Bartek Wieczorek - we talked about hipster photography. Once, in one sentence, I wrote something like this about him, among others, but also about Kuba Dabrowski, with whom he can somehow be connected, after all. Is there such a thing as "hipster photography"? Misiorny cut himself off, I retreated with a crawl, but the curators insisted on hipsterism. Maybe Misiorny is not a hipster, but he represents a more general trend. If this photography wasn't so current, so precisely hipster, there wouldn't be anything to write and talk about, anything to rave about. This is the connection to its time and to the age of the authors fetishized in the curatorial texts, the vintages of the '80s and early '90s. Rightly or wrongly, Krajewska concluded the discussion by reiterating that the end of Misiorny - and by implication his followers, colleagues and friends - will be commercialism, the hell of making money at any cost. It's hard to wish Misiorny and the rest that this won't happen, but at the very least the moment of selling out, of commercialization, should be delayed; this is probably also how the "gallerists" of Sensitivity intuitively act, seemingly selling out, but actually disposing of the market.
At the exhibition Plateau her photos were shown by Lena Dobrowolska, a photographer who has definitely done her homework for Wolfgang Tillmans and is able to completely capture even a rather difficult gallery space, transforming it into a representation of the author's, one would like to say - subjective vision of reality. Plateau Dobrowolska was prepared in curatorial collaboration with the Orski/Zamoyski duo. After the success of the exhibition, Dobrowolska, who resides in the UK by day, joined Tenderness. The show of the artist's works was accompanied by a symptomatic, rather enigmatic text, maintained in the manner of Deleuzian: "Plateau focuses on exploring the concept of the human condition as part of a larger geographic, social, cultural organism. The project is an attempt to illustrate the concept of consciousness as 'embodied knowledge', comparable to long-term historical, temporal and spatial processes, resembling the process of formation of sediments or geological folds."
It sounds a bit like the legendary Sedimentation Ireneusz Zjeżdżałka, but more distant from his work thinking about photography and geological deposits probably can no longer be. Dobrowolska's exhibition found recognition in the eyes of a critic, Alek Hudzik, who wrote in his report on Photomonth: "Plateau Lena Dobrowolska's [is] for me the biggest discovery of the festival. Her cold, enigmatic photographs of humans as part of a climatic, geographic or social system barely suggest a subject. Dobrowolska fits perfectly into the ranks of a wider group of artists, not only of the youngest generation, who are very reserved and reluctant to communicate with the viewer."
While conditionally agreeing with the critic's view that the lack of effective communication - enigmatic - are positive features of the youngest photography, it is worth considering the specifics of this "range of a wider group of artists" and the potential consequences of the lack of understanding on the author-receiver line. Arguably, the return to nature of the youngest artists has something of the sublimity of the Romantics, but it is dissected in a series of technical images that do not inspire horror rather than aesthetic admiration. It's nature, but domesticated and ready to hang on a wall at home. The understatement, the lack of connection to a specific place and time evident not only in the lack of precise descriptions of the photographs, but also in the very framing of nature and places, is related to the search for images adequate to convey a certain mood. And the enigmatic mood, or "Stimmung" would like to say, either grasp or not, nothing more needs to be communicated here.
The worst thing is to baffle the subject. It seems that a counter to Dobrowolska's exhibition is Laura Makabresku's exhibition, also shown - at ShowOff. The exhibition The moon is for adults only is an emanation of girlish, erotic fantasies (rather than perversions), a catalog of "fairy tale" clichés: an attractive young woman, sometimes nude, sometimes in stockings, sometimes in a mask, in moss, in the woods, in an embrace, in bed, with lots of stuffed animals, deer, hares, foxes, photographs against the sun, boughs, sentimental details straight out of a now heavily faded 19th century horror play. Macabresku does not refrain from including scattered sentences of self-commentary in the booklet accompanying the exhibition. Even if some of the pictures are quite successful, the flat text of the reflections, written in a decorative, slightly italicized font, straight out of a boarding school girl's diary, brings out their falseness and pretentiousness. Thought One: "A fairy tale has something of the Light in it: it calms and enchants, but it also has its other cruel side, where anxiety lurks." Thought two "There are fairy tales where monsters walk around." And the third "I have learned humility and caution towards Art, but this attitude fills me with constant anxiety - mathematical patience is the same kind of self-aggression as madness. I oscillate between." Unfortunately, one would like to add.
The last photographer relevant to ShowOff and new photography is Lukasz Rusznica. First, however, I will deal with Anna Orlowska, to return to Rusznica at the end of the text.
LEAKAGE, SEEPAGE
Everything means everything, and at the same time everything is surprising
Roland Barthes
Anna Orlovskaya since the cycle The day before is a rising star of Polish photography. About few artists of her generation one could hear so much good things in the last two-three years, and not necessarily only in connection with the presence in the pages of the reGeneration2: Tommorrow's Photographers Today.. Paradoxically, for some critics, Orlovskaya's good streak ended with the graduation show Leaked organized in the spring of 2012 at the Prexer club in Lodz as part of the program accompanying the FotoFestival. With this exhibition Orłowska contradicted the previously developed, visually strong and referring to contemporary cinema aesthetics The day before. Instead of consistently presented, carefully staged and realized frames, she presented a montage of photographs typical of new photography that at first glance have nothing in common. It is worth quoting a passage from Orlowska's commentary on her own works: "Leaked is an attempt to visualize concepts, states and phenomena related to the human condition. It is a series about the uncertainty of the world, the unstable illusion of reality, false desires. I am interested in what the dream world is and how it works, and how much it changes under the influence and pressure of reality. The conflict between what a person would like to be and what he is. I am also interested in what is and how deep is the distortion of the relationship between modern man and the world, nature."
Photos from Leaked Although they were combined with loose series produced earlier by Orlovskaya - for example, the What He Found in the Forest (2009) or The Bone Will Grow in 30 Days (2010). The next stage of the author's remix was an exhibition curated by Jakub Swircz Seepage at Warsaw's Lookout gallery. Here, too, the artist decided to move away from a quasi-film narrative and instead offer viewers an entrained, multi-faceted construction, a far from linear montage of views and afterimages. At the same time, the staggered transition from The day before to Seeps can be read as a shift in focus from the anxieties of a young woman procrastinating on fundamental life decisions to more generalized anxieties, presumably also related to sexuality, depressive and neurotic atmospheres. Orlovskaya has a brilliant eye and sensitivity. What is unbearably pretentious in Makabresek, in her becomes authentic macabre (the motif of the heads of dead deer and deer used in two different ways). However, Orlovskaya, like Macabresku, writes unnecessarily. Her poems are indeed bad, as the usually tardy critics quickly picked up. But perhaps they are also meant to be bad - to emphasize the still immature nature of the photograph. The artist elaborates on the theme of image/text relationship as follows: "These poems arose quite naturally while working on the exhibition. They tell about specific photographs. They were intended to form a kind of diptych. So no, I am not a poet," she says. The poem included in the book Bone will knit in 30 days It [...] was created especially with her in mind. The graphic designer asked me to write a text, an introduction to the album. Instead - I wrote a poem, because I didn't want to flatten these photos. Sometimes, when you start calling what the photographs are about, it becomes a cliché. That's what pictures are made for, to get away from words, and eventually you have to describe everything anyway." However, it seems that, at least in this particular case, the photos do well without text. And among the photographic motifs are a deer's head floating in the water, a sad monkey and strange men in suits, as if from Lynch, lit by greenish light, and a bluish self-portrait of the artist (photo/video). Here Orlovskaya is tired, as if weeping, "tired of reality" precisely. A photo in a side corridor depicting an infant sleeping on a tree branch stands out from the whole exhibition. An allegory of motherhood? More likely a compromise with the gallery, since the photo is probably meant for people who, at the sight of the deer's head, are disgusted to leave the exhibition. In the middle, on the table, there is also a photograph with the title soaking in. I think it's a black ink stain. It's not about the black hole, it's about impotence, maybe not castration anxiety, but also some feminine, quite gut feelings of end, danger, decay and passing. The urge and rush towards death - not what Orski's vital photographs, or the earlier, this immature, male, not melancholy-fluid Zacharski. In a text for the ArtBazaar blog, curator Jakub Śwircz writes that Orłowska "exploits our conformist attitude to the photographic image in her works. We don't demand too much from it, treating it as a plane on which the eye glides easily and quickly. Here, in precisely prepared images, it is easy to fall, to dislocate resulting precisely from lack of attention. In her photographs [...] a strategy of small displacements is developed, of reducing the visual points that would allow us to determine whether we are dealing with something real, possible in our reality. This strategy leads to a disruption of the symmetry between what we look at and what is visible. Hence the gap, a small crack on which we can tip over. The shifts of the two planes introduced by Orlovskaya are modest, reminiscent of the mechanism present in classical fairy tales, in which also small changes in the landscape, a single element led to strangeness, a sense of disorientation. As a result, our rationalizing compass is lost."
Losing the compass doesn't make things any easier for critics (just like getting lost in the woods or fishing too deep before). Lidia Pankow writes in the Biweekly, as it were ad vocem, that "an artistic or curatorial gesture, repeated many times, turns into its own caricature." Adding that "fortunately, Anna Orlowska first and foremost takes pictures." Pankow attempts to describe Orlowska's mannerism, finding in her photos "baroque excess and artificiality, hidden behind a facade of control and realism of precise representation. Nature, the object of contemplation, loses its depth and drama here. It becomes an object of cool study, a study of the possibilities of visual recording. And the mountain landscape, in which a massif hidden behind fog fills most of the frame, and the monkey's snout flattened in close-up with a sad expression, are demonstrations of skill in handling composition and light. Does the onlooker establish a relationship with nature? The lack of emotion in the photographs can be disappointing. We are not in any intimacy. Nothing is betrayed, nor is there any romantic elation. Even the face of the crying woman - in the photo and video - reveals nothing. I'm looking at her beauty, which is the result of the image - stains, contours, textures and contrasts, not a feature of the person being portrayed." "Is it Orlowska's impotence or tactics?" wonders the critic, who accurately points out the strengths, but also the weaknesses of the latest photography, and not only of Orlowska. For Pankow, this photography is "dramatic and empty at the same time," "fresh and melancholic," "ironic," "tricky (but in a bad way)," "monumental," "slightly mocking," "like the fashion shoots in the lifestyles magazines," or even "too trendy." Quasi-The perverse appeal of this type of photography, according to the critic, has been so exploited as to be measured.
However one assesses Orlowska's quest - she is, after all, still a very young artist - it is hard not to notice the master class represented by her, clearly visible when moving on to another exhibition at the Refleksy gallery nearby, where Magdalena Kącikowska shows Amor fatiThe film is a monochrome, gloomy, but rather flat picture of a forest (branches, bushes, ferns, branches, a naked girl with her back turned to the viewer and a pond with a dead fish floating on the surface). The accompanying text by Olga Wiankowska features both Jung, Nietzsche and the Knights of the Round Table. It's hard to resist quoting at least the beginning of the trailer for the works in the series Amor fati. According to Wiankowska, it is "a story full of symbolism and metaphors. The forest shown by the artist frightens and fascinates at the same time, leads into temptation, awakens passion, which is impossible to resist. What emerges is the image of a "demonic woman," the mythical Lilith becoming part of wild nature. The photographs evoke associations of Dante's journey to hell, a horror-filled story from the The Alder King, but also fairy tales in which the forest becomes a symbol of overcoming fear and the inner transformation of the protagonists, such as the fairy tale of Wise Vassilis or of Hansel and Gretel...". I cite Kącikowska and Wiankowska because the example of this duo shows more clearly the problems the new photography has with itself. Neither Dante nor Hansel and Gretel will help solve them. Speaking of problems, there is also the thread of the artist's self-therapy here - it is to be hoped that it ended successfully.
If Orlovskaya could give up her rhyming, one must at least give her credit on the plus side for her brevity and sparing doses of literary talent. It turns out that the absence of fundamental flaws can also be a considerable advantage.
To conclude the review of selected individual attitudes and proposals from the circle of new photography - Luke Rusznica, promised earlier. The exhibition at ShowOff was "trashy," as Hudzik writes, it's true. But it was a strange exhibition, unnecessary I guess, because Rusznica already had quite a track record in aesthetics trash exhibited successfully in its native Breslau (e.g., group exhibitions Biology. Chemistry. Physics. and Some people think we are ugly organized at the local BWA in 2010). From the exhibition in Krakow, which he probably could have successfully curated himself without the help of his colleagues from Sensitivity, a book seems more important and relevant - not a zine, but just a sizable album, titled "The Artist. And so I will not tell you what is most important. Being the result of a collaboration with graphic designer Thomas Schostok (ths), the book is more interesting than the exhibition, because Rusznica is at his best when he doesn't try to be stylized, when he is honest and is himself. When he says little, but shows a lot. In the context of the gentle, perhaps only slightly vulgar Sensitivity, Rusznica's book is a display of boorish sensitivity. It is strange and, above all, different. Rusznica can also be contrasted freely with Orlovskaya. Girlish poetry and women's anxieties turn into gay or -. excusez le mot - queer hardcore. Rusznica transgresses the visual norm established for the presence of homoeroticism in the visual arts space by Karol Radziszewski, Oiko Petersen, Karolina Breguła, Maciej Osika and other softcore photographers. In a context washed of politics, social issues and the experience of otherness, the new photography Rusznica restores the experience of politicality - but it is emancipatory photography, albeit in a Genetovian edition rather than by the standard of Euro-political correctness. In addition to scenes of sex, before and after, the photographer incorporates into the narrative images of family life, portraits of friends, details, pets, reflections in glass and glimpses of undefined landscapes. Rusznica can be situated vis-à-vis new photography, vis-à-vis artists dealing with the issue of sexuality and sexual minorities, but one can also look at these images as an attempt to permeate the work of photographers exploring the sensibilities of young, heterosexual men. A comparative reading is interesting The most important thing I won't tell you anyway and books by Kuba Dabrowski (Western,2011 i Sweet Little Lies,2012), Krzysztof Pacholak (Pretty Sweet,2012), Filip Zawada (Wooden mating, 2011) and zines published by Sensitivity. Rusznica's experience may not be extreme (references to Jurgen Teller and Nan Goldin, but also Robert Frank, the Surrealists, John Baldesari and - obligatorily - Jeff Wall proliferate in Waldemar Pranckiewicz's text), but it seems to stand apart from the flat background of Polish emo-photography made by the straight creators. I guess it will stay that way already, that what is different attracts attention more. The norm, the national average, even well photographed remain boring in the long run. Ruff is uncompromising, at times pornographic, pushing the experience of intimacy, of falling in love and being lost, of using and being used to the limit. If - as has been the subject of environmental commentary - Kuba Dabrowski, photo editor, photo-critic, photographer and, above all, Polish blogging pioneer, guru of the Tumblr generation and selfpublishing, showed his own erection, as it were, in passing, in a booklet titled. WesternRusznica pulled the theme and whole sequences of images taken from the author's life are focused on the male member. The motif of the penis may no longer be shocking in world photography, but if we are talking about authenticity, exploration of sexuality and intimacy in the Polish context, in the case of the The most important thing I won't tell you anyway we are dealing with the breaking of taboos. Rusznica shows that new photography related to subjectivity and intimacy makes no sense without a connection to the author's life, and if it's going to be authentic, go ahead and make it so.
OLD SCHOOL
Yet everything seems old in this new
Headquarters
So that one begins to understand that the predilection for antiquity
Taste of the old
Haunted people as early as the cave age
Everything here was so precious and so new
Everything here is so precious and so new
That the thing more old or already somewhat used
Seems more expensive
Than what is at hand
Guillame Apollinaire, Palace of Thunder (Caligrams)
Recent photography also translates into the practice of older artists. Its peculiarities can be tried to be grasped by reflecting on the change in the work of artists already well established on the scene. Certainly, a perfect blend of older and newer is the collaboration between Dorota Buczkowska, a multi-media artist, and Przemek Dzienis, with whom, in duo, they make subtle sculptural works turned into surreal photographs. Thanks to the marketing department of the Paris Photo fair, which decided in 2010 to publish on posters and invitations the result of Buczkowska and Dzienis' collaboration, it was this duo that became the "face" of Eastern and Central Europe, which was then in the spotlight. Dzienis continues his own work and collaborations with, for example, Małgorzata Szymankiewcz (BWA Warsaw, 2012). Another duo that is vigilantly inspired by the aesthetics of new photography is Zuza Krajewska and Bartek Wieczorek, who both in exhibitions (Power, 2011), as well as individual series of photographs, enter into a dialogue with fans of art under the sign of Ryan McGinley, but also Polish young photographers. The Krajewska-Wieczorek duo directs their attention towards the new-old-documentary and artists such as Igor Omulecki, who today's freshness and authenticity could be a precursor (Beautiful people,2005), maybe also Szymon Rogiński (Kra, 2012), but they are all too literal, too strong, not "tender" enough compared to the youth. Even in their "personal projects". The guru still remains the aforementioned Kuba Dabrowski, who is being followed by Michal Szlaga and, above all, Rafal Milach, who outclasses the others. Certainly, of the documentary filmmakers, he uses the new manner best - not fetishizing "display", uses his power. And if he has flipped to a new form of display and function, along with him, the esteemed trendsetter of Polish photography, the entire Sputnik Photos collective and its adjuncts. Sputnik's exhibitions and publications combine documentary with increasingly subjective, emotional stories told by the authors - as in the case of the flagship (IS)not (2010), but also 7 Rooms Milach (2012). Milach proves with remarkable ease that he is able to take a great photo with any camera, and then construct an exhibition out of it and put together a book. Balancing on the edge, he knows how not to fall into the hell of stylization, a drawer with the words "over-designed".
The Milach school is one thing - after all, Kamil Zacharski and Patryk Karbowski, for example, originated from it - and the Poznań school is another. Exhibitions by Michal Grochowiak and Michal Bugalski, with their psychoanalytic bent and attractive visual form, can also be added to the new trend.
New photography is trendy, hipster. It has refreshed the exhibition and publication experience, and given a boost to a somewhat predictable medium. But what is an advantage can easily turn out to be a flop - the escape from ubiquitous "projects" and all too easy "typologies" - usually ends up in a pushy impressionism that can perhaps only be compared with the graphomania that often accompanies photographs and - all in all - epigonishness hiding under the guise of freshness, novelty and youth. Departure from design thinking and reflection on the socially relevant, the political, the historical and the concrete can lead to worshipful somnambulism, solipsism, meaningless emotional and photographic alienation, escapism and similar neuroses. Many of these series of emotional photos are something between an ambitious fashion shoot, a mediocre Tumblr and no art at all. When getting down to exploiting one's sensibilities, it's worth remembering that even more than architectural typologies, tiresome exhibitions full of motifs ripped to the bone can prove tiresome: the wing of a jet plane seen through the passenger window, the forest, roots, branches, stuffed animals, heads and masks put on selfies and familiar girls, tattoos, body scars and appropriate styles, old-school storefronts and strange decorations, self-portraits sad, melancholy, in a hotel (not too expensive), in a motel, in bed, figures partially or fully covered with a quilt, portraits, photographs under the sun, photographs of snow, snowmelt, blocks of ice and smashed animals, broken tree branches, female limbs, neck-neck, ankles, shoulders, knees, bushes, bushes, bushes, water surface (sea, lake, critters on the river, ponds - not very clean), birchwood á la Birkenau, girls' panties (the so-called "cinema"), all the Instagrams and other digital filters used for their own sake. Sometimes these photos really do look much better online than in a gallery; and while it may seem to some that the new emo photography is curatorial ready-made, unfortunately, it doesn't always look good.
The article appeared in issue 39 of "Fotografia Quarterly" in 2012