"White and Red" is a long-term social project of documentary filmmaker Marek Lapis, who uses the medium of photography to describe how the colors white and red function in the consciousness of society. In times of transformation and turbulent contemporary social and political changes, these colors acquire special significance in public space. The photos that make up the publication "Biała-Czerwona", coming from about 200 trips across Poland, document not only official patriotic events imbued with pathos, but also various aspects of social life. The author is an astute observer of contemporary Polish society, presenting to our attention moments frozen in a fraction of a second: important, significant and those everyday, often unnoticed - he presents to us in artistic form.
Looking through Mark Lapis' lens is like reading excellent reportage. His photos are focused, yet panoramic. There is epic and action in them, the raw clarity of the composition of documentary photography and the complex construction of the meanings encoded in it, poetic reflection and attention to detail, and above all - an invitation to dialogue. "White and Red "is a portrait study of the transformation of the nation's self-image, shown through the prism of the collective's relationship with the national symbol. The study of political and cultural transformation is here a reflexive documentation of the processes of erosion and formation of social bonds. Mark Lapis' photographs are saturated with meanings and thus almost allegorical. At the center of these allegories, however, we find not the nation, but the question: what is a national community if we perceive it through a collective approach to its most important symbol?
The images in "White and Red" are dynamic, sometimes even aggressive. Their energy is rooted in the freshness of the gaze, which, far from being naïve, has the precious value of intellectual perceptiveness and the resulting surprise. Marek Lapis is by temperament an ethnologist, archaeologist, historian and archivist. His photography is thoroughly anthropological. The author takes seriously the subjects of his photographs, his audience and, above all, his mission as a documentarian.
It took the photographer nine years to work on "White and Red." The selected photos come from about 200 trips, from all over Poland, documenting not only official patriotic events imbued with pathos, but various aspects of social life. Marek told me that during this decade as a photojournalist he was fascinated by the ambivalence aroused by the national flag. It puzzled him to what extent the symbol unites and divides society, and what attitudes toward the red and white say about the sense of national community. During the course of this project, the eponymous national flag quite quickly transformed from an object of representation into a keyword used by the author to analyze the transformation of forms of identity and togetherness in Poland. Through this change of perspective, red and white became a framing element, a symbolic distinction of contexts in this artistic-documentary-research project, which aims to search for material and symbolic relationships, generating questions and fields of observation.
Its effect is a fragmented ethnological portrait of society in transition. This kaleidoscope of images, however, is far from the kitsch of social networks and the popular press. Marek Lapis often portrays his models from an off-stage perspective, from various heights, in unusual shots, often in uncomfortable close-ups. This is, perhaps, his antidote to the sweetly bland aesthetics of mass photography in the age of the information revolution, with its standardization, commodification and commercialization of difference, personality and individuality. The author seeks authenticity where it is most adulterated today - in bodies, collective and individual, exposed and hidden, and in their interrelationships.
Many will not like this gallery. For Marek Lapis does not flatter any ideology, rather he dismantles them. For him, photography is a tool for critical analysis of social reality, its disenchantment. Image inversion, as a method of creating news/truth, serves him as a research tool. The one-dimensionality, staticity and inversion of identities makes it easier to manipulate them. And, as we know, every populism is founded on image/identity inversion, dividing society into two antagonistic categories of "us" and "them." Because of his personal and professional self-awareness, Mark manages to stand above this dividing line.
In 1995, British social psychologist Michael Billig published his "Banal Nationalism" (Polish edition 2008), in which he examined common and widespread practices that perpetuate a sense of national identity. Billig attributed particular importance in this role to the national flag. He argued that the banality of national symbols does not mean that they are unimportant, but rather that they are ubiquitous, legally, politically and culturally sanctioned. An essential feature of these symbols is their variable potential to mobilize political feelings. More often than not, national symbols are barely noticeable, but in certain political situations they become powerful signs that unite people to peacefully or violently manifest their beliefs.
Lapis explores the meanings of red and white across the spectrum between the commonplace and the commonplace profane and pathetic sacrum. He documents its presence in the consciousness and unconsciousness of both the subjects of his photographs and his own. For as a photographer, he does not stand next to the group, but within it. Analyzing group identities, he filters his perceptions and interpretations through the prism of participant observation. His gaze is as precise in perceiving and recording external reality as it is thoroughly subjective and introspective. Hence the origin of his photos, which have nothing to do with the flag, but only - with the red and white. Using his own perception as an example, Marek shows how deeply imprinted into our consciousness are symbols of collective identities, how "banal" is the omnipresence of national colors, how common and real, though deeply problematic, is the quality of the bond that is supposed to permanently unite members of the national community, which Benedict Anderson once called "imagined."
Mark's photos always "want something from me." They hook me. They ask questions that I can't help but ask. By asking, they put into contexts that hurt or amuse, move or embarrass, but always concern me personally - like all that intangible but real that the red and white flag represents to me. The photographer says his mission is to study the remains of people. Photography also serves him, he insists, to understand himself and to reconcile with himself by exploring his own identity. It allows him to explore empathy, primarily by meeting and getting to know marginalized people, mainly those with disabilities.
Asked which photo was particularly important to him in the book, Marek pointed without hesitation to a photograph with a man in a wheelchair during a national celebration in the Old Market Square in Poznań. Because of the angle of the shot, the man's eyes, which are well below the line of the other spectators' faces, are obscured by red and white caution tape. Without seeing the man's eyes, we see his smile. This is the only cheerful figure in the line of participants in this patriotic demonstration. The only one who seems to feel joy at being in a group of compatriots celebrating a national bond. And perhaps most importantly for that bond.
Alicia Kusiak-Brownstein - Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA. She received her master's degree from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She works on the history of women, gender, and the history of historiography and nationalism.
MARK LAPIS' BOOK, WHITE AND RED, POZNAŃ 2018 CAN BE PURCHASED HERE