Even an empty landscape is full of vague presences for me, actually a landscape cannot be empty, it always takes form. When I face the space, I'm in it at the same time, and when I'm left alone with it, being like a medium, I can sense a gentle vibration, it's emptiness.
"Dwelling machines" and playgrounds of steel, shortcut paths trodden in lawns by spontaneous planners, hourglass sandboxes, benches and residual greenery dwarfed by the scarcity of light. The last poplar trees, like living monuments to an era of rapid growth.
Such a space is a bit like that 19th-century mirror from my grandmother, which wanders with me from apartment to apartment, slightly tarnished already, as if the repetition of images wears it out, as if the presences that fill it pile up and thicken, making the image of the moment so ambiguous as to be almost illegible.
When I press the shutter of the camera, a strange process begins, as if I am crossing out the present by knocking it down into the abyss of endless duration. The very gesture contains a beginning and some unimaginable end, an annulment of time and space. The light has already breathed energy into the silver crystals, the latent image has come to life, this is the beginning of history irreversibly recorded in the negative.
Where does it come from that irresistible impression that contemporary photography often looks more like a vivisection of reality? Every day, willy-nilly, I see an excess of superfluous images, they wave like gaudy curtains, separating me from what is the state of affairs and looks completely different. Beyond the wall of aversion pass only those images that are not evidence, but testimony. Testimony comes with presence, participation and attentiveness. Now that I am drifting on the surface of my old photos, the complexity of the processes that accompanied their creation allows me to rediscover them.
London, the day must have been drizzly when I set up the tripod, mounting the camera box on it. As usual, I felt a slight excitement mixed with anxiety, and I wouldn't be able to say today which prevailed. Who was I there? A voyeur? A flaneur, with an inseparable black camera box, that strange urn for embalming time. When I unveil the shutter, when the exposure process begins, I feel as if something is sucking me inside, for a moment I am inside, sliding on the surface of the film. Attentiveness is in celebration, when I enlarge this negative after almost two decades, I discover a blurry silhouette inside the half-open door, so I was the observer and the observed at the same time.
In the photograph is Mill Island, but I did not think at the time about the place itself, so separate and so distinct then, today it looks completely different. A mirror of water and a lonely bench on which a void squatted.
The photogenia of the city is hidden beneath its surface, I peel off layer after layer looking for the state before now, as if what is now hides an indefinite past, its image. It's not even about what was here before: a house, a factory, a tree, a playground, but what happened in this setting, who happened? The empty landscape is a mold from a child's sandbox, turn the sand into a starfish, or a seashell and the imagination takes shape.
Photography, when I leave aside the familiar etymology and try to look for another reference, closer to the present, I divide the word fo-to-gra-fia into syllables and stop at the middle two "is a game" . It is primarily a game with time, a compulsive and unrealistic desire to stop. Is it really unrealistic?
Winter on the edge. On the edge of the Old Canal I put my camera, nothing can happen, no one accidentally enters the frame, and even if he enters it will dissolve in a dozen seconds of exposure, during which, I know for sure, the water mirror will tarnish reflecting the indistinct shapes of time.
The longing for the original landscape is a utopia, traces of presence are everywhere, even the forest is full of subtle signs, the river repeats some whispers, broken conversations, words and images. The empty renovated sluice looks like an archeological site. Perhaps the photograph appeared to hide the real image from us, to blur its meaning. In the theater of photography, its reality is a curtain.
I remember the image of the footbridge to Ludwikowo not only from these photographs, but from several situations between the photos. These are images that have embedded themselves in memory and, for the time being, do not have their material representations in the form of photographs. I write down the words before there is an interface for reading images from thoughts. The words are material, too. A procession of people glides along a footbridge, candles in commercials buzz, it's damp and crowded. This strange chain of people and chrysanthemums floats above the tracks together with the memory of those who have passed away, it's the first of November some year.
How does photography age? How does the image wear out? The edges of the photo fray, when you fold the photograph, a thin layer of emulsion cracks at the bend and slowly begins to fall off. The same thing happens when you tear the photo. Sometimes fungus or mold appears on a poorly stored photo, it's a great substrate for other life. But the image also comes to life under the gaze, it is like a "magic memory coin that is never the same."1.
Bydgoszcz 2014-2022
1 Praise of the shadow by J.L. Borges
Post script
The history of the project dates back to 2001. While taking these photos, I was healing the trauma of the advent of digital photography and getting used to Bydgoszcz after the shock I experienced upon returning to the city after 11 years of study. I continue to take pictures, although perhaps less intensely, as if in counterpoint to the prevailing fashion and fetishization of analog photography. In the meantime, there were cameras on the phone. Due to back problems, I gave up the large 13×18 format, although I still let reality unhurriedly seep into the 120 film in the body of the reliable Zeiss Iconty, or the SX70 which chimerically embalms reality. So much for the equipment, and as for other technicalities, it may be worth adding that the photos in the text are scans of prints made in accordance with the photochemical tradition (though perhaps not exactly photochemical, because I also drowned them in tea), after years I made enlargements of 30×40 cm, the original contact sheets were no longer enough for me. I didn't want to reveal the grain, but I knew that the silver crystals would add a story even years later.
Marek Noniewicz (1971) - studied biology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. Already while studying biology, he decided to develop his passion for photography by taking up studies at Lidova Koncervator in Ostrava, deepened his knowledge by continuing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, where while studying he also served as a technologist in the Department of Photography, then headed by Professor Stefan Wojnecki. After graduation, he takes a job as a photography instructor at the Youth Palace in Bydgoszcz, then works as an independent instructor, and since 2017 has been the curator of the Museum of Photography in Bydgoszcz. She is a certified oligophrenopedagogue. As an artist, she works in a variety of media: video, performance and photography, in which she often draws on historical techniques. He documents spaces of apparent absence, using analog photography in an attempt to find its organic origin. He is also a lecturer , author of texts on photography and curator of exhibitions, and conducts original workshops on photography and light-sensitive phenomena (source: http://mareknoniewicz.blogspot.com/).
The exhibition "Pencil of light" will be presented as part of the Vintage Photo Festival in Bydgoszcz at the Brain gallery - opening on 23.09.2022 at 10:30 pm. PROGRAM VINTAGE PHOTO FESTIVAL