Photography in itself is never the end. Photography captures the one-of-a-kind "Here and Now," because, after all, the second before the photo is taken and the second after the photo is taken, the world is completely different. It does not end, whether it is reflected on paper or already beyond the sight of man. It continues even without our knowledge. Therefore, photography, especially photography as a purely documentary record, will always be infinite and unique. Nor will it succumb to the recalled "eternal" thesis of "Everything has already been". It does not have to and will not have to fight for new trends in the visual arts. Maintaining its "aesthetics of documentary purity" and the dominant content of the image through consciousness, the photographer will always exist.
The photography that Marcin Urbanowicz and many photographers on our globe "practice" is mainly intended to be a witness describing given places and realities. It also has the task of depicting these "realities" in the most "pure" way possible. This creates photographs that are a window through which the viewer can discover interesting places, often full of absurdities and non-obviousness, but without unnecessary "distractions" on the part of the author. "Provincial Photographers" have a natural ability to discover and show what is invisible to many. We are often amazed by the photographs they have taken, even more so when they take them in what is known as our backyard. It's not just an outsider's view, as it's accepted to say about the fresh perspective of a visiting photographer. Most photographers who document provincial towns and villages carry a very sensitive and unique radar.
Sometimes they hail from the province themselves, sometimes they are quiet travelers who return to a given place repeatedly, but it also happens that they stopped only once in a given town or village, and that was enough for the aforementioned radar to work effectively. A common feature of "provincial documentarians" is not only reporting on small towns and villages, recording changes, creating a record of agglomeration documentation, but documenting the lifestyle of residents, their customs and inner worlds. Portraits of people from the provinces are mainly created without the participation of the people themselves (as a human figure in the frame), and this can also be seen in Marcin Urbanowicz's photos. Any development of places, backyard or street arrangements accurately show the thoughts of a community. Emphasizing such thought in photographs is one of the many qualities that build good documentary photography.
Our "Polish exoticism" is still most evident in the provinces. This is an inexhaustible subject, which is why one always looks at such photographs with curiosity and sometimes with a smile on one's face. Not only the absurdities of the People's Republic of Poland were photogenic. Young documentarians show us all the time how abstractly "locals" furnish their spaces. There will always be places that need to be discovered, that are worth showing because they are an important "portrait of society." There will always be "non-invasive documentary photography" strong in its simplicity of depicting reality. It does not need unnecessary artistic endeavors to delight, to arouse interest, to make the viewer wonder. We like that seemingly simple photographs ask many questions. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that these images were created primarily by photographers who are gifted with a sensitivity to the world, and their inner radar discovers even more deeply those worlds that for many (especially natives) are paradoxically too ordinary and completely uninteresting. And it is often enough to go beyond the building, beyond the barn, beyond the bus stop to see how surreal reality can be and how beautiful ugliness can be.
This "beautiful ugliness" is "the poetics of a document," as Wojtek Zawadzki used to say. And this poetics can also be felt in Urbanowicz's photographs. We need such photographs and photographers. Together they create multi-layered social portraits. Such photographs (places) and photographers are like dualities that cannot exist without each other, and thanks to this we can get to know not only interesting localities, spaces (often totally shocking to us), but also the person and thinking of the photographer. There is an awareness in Urbanowicz's photographs, a documentarian's radar and a thought that fills the encountered frames with content.
Urbanovich writes about his project as follows:
Cycle Province (working title) is a documentation of the contemporary image of the space around villages and towns (up to 25,000 inhabitants). These are places far from agglomerations, large cities, often far from busy transit routes and expressways. A province is a space on the margins, on the side of the road. But also the province is all that fills the space between large centers. Ordinariness and normalcy. I have been looking at the Polish province for more than two years. The space I photograph never ceases to amaze me. The province is primarily a utilitarian space. Changes are made to make it better, simpler, but also nicer. Often, temporary solutions grow into further layers and become the background for further changes. It is a space that is repeatedly recycled. On the buildings you can see successive layers of paint, changes of owners, and for me it is also successive decades of history. You can perfectly see the fashions and styles that have been arriving in the province of late. Sometimes I find myself in places unable to believe that I haven't moved back in time. My project is also a journey through a map saturated with absurdity and ugliness. At the same time, it is a sentimental story about a world that is disappearing. There are almost no people in my photographs. The space itself already says enough about the inhabitants and users.
The changes the author writes about are a continuous process worthy of photographic observation. This incoming content is a description of a society that is different all the time from the communities of large cities. The landscape of the provinces seems more natural than the "view noise" of large metropolises, where there is less and less individual thought on the streets. Therefore, the provinces offer no less interesting and more real picture in all respects.
Marcin Urbanowicz (1989) - a Gliwice resident living in Lubliniec. Graduated with honors from the Fotoedukacja photography school in Katowice, and then from Press, Advertising and Publishing Photography at Warsaw University. Documentary photographer by passion, graphic designer and photographer by profession, working with several Warsaw marketing agencies. Winner of more than 50 national and international competitions - including: Chromatic Awards, International Photography Awards, Leica Street Photo, Polska Ulicznie or Silesian Press Photography. Participant of the Debuts project bringing together the best photographers of the young generation in one place. Invited to participate in several photography festivals, including the Wojnowski Festival of Photography and the Silesian Photo Marathon.
2 Komentarzy
Charles
Very interesting photographs. There is breath, reflectiveness in them. However, I disagree with the author of the text that there is "purity" in them. Fortunately.
Maciej
What a good vibe. Ideliciously apt with this stop. The weather turned up the contrast.