Documenting Crisis Documenting Crisis
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“More Than Bauhaus”, press materials, International Cultural Centre in Kraków
Experiences

Documenting Crisis

Three Photos About Poverty
Wojciech Nowicki
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time 15 minutes

The testimony to the interwar era presented at the recent Kraków exhibition More Than Bauhaus is difficult to accept. In addition to people, the photos portray poverty, hunger, emaciation. And simultaneously, we the viewers know well that the world presented in these photos will disappear in a moment. This essay about three similar photos, which nevertheless differ significantly, was written for “Przekrój” by Wojciech Nowicki.

I have here three photos; I saw small prints of them at the exhibition. They were easy to miss. The first two might be by the same photographer, but that’s just an assumption. From the same period, on the same topic: the effects of the Great Depression in 1929–1933 in Germany. The third photo can easily be grouped with the first two, because it’s about a crisis in the same land – but here it’s a different crisis. Not a global one, but an internal, German one, an earlier one. It’s from 1920.

All of the photos, occupying the space between reportage and documentary, were created in the years when press photography didn’t worry about photographers’ names: the person with the camera was just an ordinary piece of equipment. An arduous, neverending job, but also an opportunity for work and pay. During times of poverty, they photograph people suffering poverty, but they do it from the position of

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In Praise of Analogue Photography
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Science, magic and technology, or in praise of analogue photography.

It seems ironic that the way we think about photography has become so dispassionate – after all, it was once considered a way of locking people’s souls into motionless pictures. We trust the science behind each photograph so much – or perhaps so much time has passed since the first-ever face was captured through a lens – that we think less of clicking the shutter release than we do of pressing the dishwasher power button. And perhaps we do feel more awe when confronted with the wet turmoil inside the dishwasher’s innards than when witnessing what those photons, injected inside the camera, do on its digital matrix.

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