A number of metaphors are used in relation to photography to convey the nature of its ambiguous and intriguing imagery. Some of them refer to its relation to time: photography as embalming time, photography as history, as a record of past time. Others refer to its pictorial relation to the world, to the places pictured, and embrace photography as a window or as a mirror to the world. There are also those that combine both the aspect of time and place, in the metaphor of photography as a journey.
In view of Mariusz Hermanowicz's work, the metaphor of a window and the metaphor of a journey seem to best correspond to his attitude toward the world and photography. All of Hermanowicz's work has been an observation of someone from the outside in a double sense, psychological and physical. From outside one's own psychological world, the experience of which cannot be fully conveyed, and from outside the physical world, from the window. The problem of the real window and the metaphorical window is very common in the works of this Author. Moreover, it stands at the very beginning of his work, which began with looking curiously and attentively through a window. The title of the first series is precisely "View from my Window. A chronicle of the years 1968-1979." In the title of this series, there is another important problem in Mariusz Hermanowicz's works, the problem of time.
Forty photographs taken over eleven years from the window of a family apartment are not only a subjective description of a not-so-expansive fragment of the immediate reality existing within the range of the gaze from the window, but also a permanent record of past time, a record of minor and trivial as well as important and historical events that happened outside, under the window. The relationship that occurs here connects the subjective gaze, fixed in a photograph taken from a clearly marked distance, with the fixation of a temporal situation in it. This is one of the problems constantly present in the other series of photographs and in single photographs by this Author. In this first series of views from the window, many threads and problems are intertwined: history with the Author's personal life and the lives of other people; the public sphere with the private sphere; the internal with the external. Combining the intertwining of such different issues in a single work is also an enduring element of Hermanovich's work. The first series also illustrates a method peculiar to him, based on a series of photographs connected, like successive pages in a book, by a common theme, from which a linear narrative sequence is built.
However, it lacks another element that complements Hermanovich's method, namely the hand-inscribed text of description or commentary under the photograph. The handwritten duct of careful handwriting not only served to convey content complementing or commenting on the content of the photograph, it also emphasized the personal nature of the works. Personality in his works is of great importance. Personal is the look partially preserved in the photo, personal is the commentary contained in the text under the photo, personal is also the handwriting of the text.
All of these elements are used by Hermanovich to spin stories. For he was a notorious and invariably interesting storyteller using images and words with equal mastery. Watching and reading, along with feeling and thinking, are two indispensable activities necessary in interacting with his works. The suggestiveness of the message in them is strengthened by the combination of the fleetingness of the photographic imagery with the transience and laconic nature of the description underneath, which is often a poetic or philosophical reflection.
Photography is a testimony of being here and now. A photograph always captures only what has passed a moment, a fraction of a second after the shutter is pressed, or what is decades away. The image of people and things captured in a photograph, having snatched them from their immersion in time, runs out to what will happen in the future the moment it is read. For its author, a photograph is an envoy to the future; for its viewer, it is a visitor from the past. Each photograph contains the suggestion of two times. It does not include a third time, the present. Indeed, the photograph makes a leap over the present by recording the past and turning to the future. There are only two glimpses that connect photography with the present, the gaze of the photographer attempting to preserve his image, although this attempt inevitably leads to a severance of ties with the present at the moment the picture is taken, and the gaze of the viewer of that image. The only connection to the present is these two moments before the picture is taken and the moment the viewer views it, between them there is only the past tense. The first moment always occurs, the latter is only related to the photographer's hope that it will happen someday. On this fragile hope he builds his work. In general, however, we do not realize it. Sometimes we are helped by art, including works such as Mariusz Hermanowicz's. In many of them we can feel the fascination of this side of the phenomenon of photography and the amazement of its effects.
The game with time and the discoveries made with the help of photographs are not always about what was his direct experience. Communing so intensely and closely with time, experiencing its course through photographs, must have directed him towards the time of the past, towards his own closer and further family history. The method of work he has developed, has created for him the possibility of living contact with history, allows for a peculiar form of participation in it. In his works we can find another, specifically Polish aspect of the relationship with the past time. It manifests itself in the treatment of photography as a personal tool of defense against the effects of history. This aspect appears in many series. The strongest and most openly revealed in the series "Vilnius, and yet..." (2001/2002), describing a place connected with the family history of his parents, the Hermanowicz and Domeyko families. "To photograph all that I love about this city and take it with me, so that no one and no one can ever take it away from me again. Getting up every day at dawn, walking the length and breadth of Vilnius, setting up my camera, taking pictures, I experienced moments of very intense happiness... No one can take that away from me either".
The multifaceted problem of time in Mariusz Hermanowicz's work is also connected with the problem of presence, which is clearly felt in almost all his works. It has two dimensions: physical and psychological. Photography records not only the image of the place to which the lens of the camera is directed, but also the presence of the photographer in it. Presence in the physical sense is finding oneself at a certain point in time and in a certain place in space. But presence is also the awareness of this dual spatio-temporal location, the realization of which can occur at the moment the photograph is taken and at the moment the photograph is viewed. This can involve matters of History as well as private and intimate matters. In one of the most poetic series, in "Here and Now" (1989), presence refers to minor and everyday events presented from an indefinite temporal perspective, as if outside of time. The narrator's words in the poetic text of description come from outside the frame. There are no people in the pictures. We only see places that people could fill or do fill, but they are invisible in them.
Presence is not only a relationship with time, it is also a problem of place, that fragment of reality in which we are currently located. In many works, the reason for taking action was the presentation of a particular place. In most cases, it is accurately depicted. Places are sometimes different. Distant ones often become the destination of a kind of pilgrimage. Sometimes a place is discovered by accident. It is also not uncommon for it to be the immediate surroundings, seemingly well known from daily contact with him. In each of these places he discovered things that were interesting, sometimes strange and surprising. Often it turned out that the observations and discoveries made in the closest reality were the most surprising. In the series "Backyard, or theater from life taken" (1979), it is the home backyard, known in every detail. Patiently observed with careful attention, it became the theatrum of everyday life with a self-contained and engaging drama and a universal message relating to phenomena much broader than the colloquial and trivial actions of the characters in the backyard play.
The strangeness of seemingly familiar places sometimes forced Hermanowicz to depart from documentary convention. The ordinary reality of a communist-era big-plate housing estate suddenly seen from a distance seemed so strange and incomprehensible that the author entrusted its description in the series "Strange Places" (1981) to a "stranger." Only the stranger's gaze and commentary allow us to see the gray horror of its blandness of clutter and chaos, which is somewhat mitigated by a sense of humor, often present in the Author's works. His alter ego, a fictional stranger from another world, interprets the blocky reality of communist Poland in a surprising way, because he does not know what he is looking at. This ignorance causes his after all learned, logical and factual conclusions to diverge from the familiar sense of what he is looking at. This procedure, amusing in its effects, also shows how deeply we are culturally entangled in our relationship with what we have created and exist in on a daily basis. The author also pointed out in this humorous way how misleading our conclusions can be from analyzing unfamiliar and unknown manifestations of human activity.
From presence and co-presence also come certain obligations of an ethical nature related to the responsibility of being here and now. The resulting ethical imperative requires us to act. "Let's not wait. Let's not postpone. Let's start today. And so only our passions will remain after us. They are the only ones that last. Nothing else." ("Testament," 1993). Such doing what needs to be done now, a passion after which something lasting will remain, was the whole work of Mariusz Hermanowicz.
The metaphor of photography as a view from a window capturing photography in general, and the works of Mariusz Hermanowicz in particular, is combined with yet another metaphor relating to photography in general, to his work, and to his life; this is the metaphor of travel. Travel is, besides presence, a state of special relation to time and space. To commune with the works of our Author is also to travel through his life and his world, a picture of the world seen as if from behind the moving window of his camera. A significant part of single photographs or series are peculiar documents of real and metaphorical journeys. Travel is a time and a special state in which the routine of daily activities ceases to apply, if we are open to what we may encounter along the way. Travel creates distance from the immediate realm of everyday life, and offers the simple joy of freedom of movement in space and time. Awareness of the latter displacement is not always so clear and obvious. Travel tears us away from the time of ordinary life. The course of time in travel seems to slow down, sometimes we even have the illusion of stopping it. The distortion in the sensation of the passage of time while traveling is due, among other things, to the fact that we know that "normally" at this time we would be doing something completely different. Moreover, we know that most people are doing precisely what we are not doing. Awareness of this also creates a sense of strangeness, a little of which is indispensable to make the sense of distance and temporary suspension in time more palpable. A trip can become an opportunity to affirm our sense of freedom, very succinctly expressed by the Author in the series "Going to Paris..." (2002) - "I don't have to do anything, and I feel like I can do anything."
The journey also has another aspect of time. When setting out on it, we know that it will end someday, and most often we know exactly when it will happen. This is conducive to the intensification of impressions and the desire to preserve from these moments some kind of souvenir, something more lasting than a memory. This something can often be the very photography that evokes memories, capturing images of places and people met on the journey. A photograph can also become the enemy of the spontaneity and naturalness of the experiences encountered, and worse, it can make its making an end rather than a means. Hermanovich avoided this danger. When going with his camera even on a not-so-distant trip, he assumed nothing in advance except that he wanted to see something in it. Any trip can be a surprise, you just have to give it a chance to appear. Our author took those chances and happily surrendered to the surprises.
The journey is also a metaphor for life, a promise of encounters with places, things and people. It is also a foreshadowing of the joy of seeing the world as it is, when for no reason other than to travel and be there, we look at the world experiencing intensely our presence in it.
Just interacting with Mariusz Hermanowicz's works is also a journey, an engaging one to wander through his world and ours. Only on the surface are these journeys through an ordinary world, in which, however, unusual encounters and adventures can occur. The world he has shown us seems familiar. Looking at many of his works, one can say that we know it all, that it is also our reality, our objects. This world seems simple and recognizable and describable. However, the descriptions and photographs relating to it do not always depict it as such. A photograph is not always an exact reproduction of the image seen. Sometimes, directing our eyes to a piece of reality, we see something different, something different we saw and something different we photographed, to finally see something else in the photo. This, among other things, is the adventure of contact through photography with the sphere of visibility. To experience it, it is enough to be open and sometimes a little more attentive in contact with the world of objects, people and their images, as open and attentive as Hermanowicz was. He was able, in even the most ordinary and everyday manifestations of reality, to discover and show its image unusual, surprising, full of mysteries and riddles. It is enough to stop for a moment and look at it more carefully and reflect on it to feel its strangeness, mystery and charm. Through his works he seems to be saying that the mystery of it is not hidden in this world that is outside, but in ourselves, traveling through it, often without any special interest or desire to understand it. Sometimes all we need is to open ourselves to the world without any pretension to it or ourselves.
For this we also need distance, if only for a moment, to be able to see what we look at without seeing. Hermanowicz found this refreshing distance in photography, in the very act of taking a photo, which forces us to look at the world through the camera's viewfinder in a different way, and the taking of the photo evokes the need to describe the thoughts and feelings that accompanied it. This seemingly simple act can sometimes have the power of magic causing us to see by looking. But the photo that arises as a result of looking and the desire to preserve it in an image, reflects only approximately what we saw, what was the object of our vision. The word "seeing" captures well the nature of the experience arising from Mariusz Hermanowicz's photography and from interacting with his photography. Seeing means more than seeing. It is not just a purely linguistic game, it is also the essence of what photography is or can be when used in the most pure and direct way. Respecting it and believing in its ability to convey through it those visual and emotional experiences that are, after all, not easy and not obvious is perhaps not always enough. However, it is a necessary attitude to hope that openness to encounters with reality will result in surprising results. This respect and faith have invariably accompanied Mariusz Hermanowicz's work.
Mariusz Hermanowicz - Born December 17, 1950 in Olsztyn, died in Olivet, near Orleans on October 3, 2008. In 1974 he graduated from the National Film School in Lodz (diploma from the Department of Cinematography). In 1977 he won the Grand Prix in the "Golden Jantar" competition in Gdansk. Since 1978 he has been a member of ZPAF. Since 1982 he lived in France, and since 1983 he worked as a photographer for the French Ministry of Culture and Art, and since 2008 for the Conseil régional du Centre.
The article appeared in 2009 in No. 28 of "Quarterly Photography"
