From the Exhibition Curator: 

The 3rd Photodocumentfestival presents the issue of extremely different types of behaviour and problems of small communities prevalent in the 21st century, in contrast to the 20th century, which was the age of great ideologies, revolutions and social movements. The melting pot of these communities is the place of merger of forgotten tribes, ethnic groups suffering from mutual hatred, groups of immigrants, parents, children and spouses of those, who were killed in the lawless city quarters, seekers of sexual mega-sensations, old actors, scouts, transvestites, mentally handicapped, the poor, and the charcoal makers existing at the edge of the civilisation… Smaller communities are not less important. Their particular lifestyle can actually influence identity search of all of us, so called “well read people”, who represent the Western civilization. We live in a global society of “mass minorities”, where “the life of a single man in any place on the planet has an impact on the lives of others, and at the same time is shaped by the lives of others”. /Zygmunt Bauman/.

No Revolution

In 1992, Stanislaw Lem, a journalist, writer and visionary, noted: “It is no coincidence that in this century global issues such as demography are raised mainly by the astronomers”. Terrestrial questions acquire a cosmic dimension. Only 60 years ago, the human population was estimated at two billion people, while today it has risen to almost six billion individuals. One of the astronomers calculated that if the population growth rate would remain at the current level, by the year 2100 there will be 50 billion people on earth; furthermore, by the year 2033, the number is already expected to rise to 11 billion.

Despite that, no one seems to predict any revolution to come. We live in times of declining faith in politics or the state as authorities responsible for defining guidelines for the sake of community welfare. Democratic societies fall apart and divide into the individual entities, which had always been their constituent parts, though initially their emancipation did not lead to the destruction of a community as a whole. In the second half of the 20th century, emancipated individuals were still acting in favour of great social ideas, and the world was driven by important social movements fighting for a better future for all. In fact, photographers were deeply involved in this process. In particular the class of photojournalists, which emerged, flourished and slowly declined in the 20th century. Their involvement in social issues, daring expeditions to the zones of war, of political or racial conflicts, contributed to the growth of the prestige of the photographer’s profession.

There will be no revolution nowadays, since the life of a community concurs with a collective aspiration to emancipation. People are still keen on coming together for some matters’ sake, but these matters are more of a private, rather than of a public interest; they concern their own identity and not identification with an idea. The point is to create one’s own self-sufficient world. We live in “the times of the tribes”, as the sociologist Michel Maffesoli puts it. He uses the term “new tribes” to describe mushrooming communities with small hobbies as their common element. In France for example, people gather to share a glass of wine on public squares; not long ago, a “flash mob” wave of gatherings in public places following a prior agreement on social network portals swept across Poland and other western countries. “The value of solitude is going to increase […] At the same time, the tribal character of life will intensify, strengthened by the multitude of media manipulations”, foretold Lem.

The old scouts, documented by Filip Ćwik during one of their jamborees, could be considered as a similar “hobby” group. And yet, there is a fundamental difference between the gatherings facilitated by the new media and the meetings of old companions organized by the Polish Scouting Association (the oldest participant was 91). The former are idealess or based only on superficial ideas, therefore usually such “tribes” fall apart shortly after they appear. The Seniors’ Scouts Circle was created in 1980. The year 1980 and the idea of Solidarity are meaningful; however, they are not as important as the ability to create strong relationships based on emotions and ideas innate to people who had been shaped in other times and systems. They were not shaped by a satiated society. Faces of “Eternal Scouts” reflect their reciprocal feelings. There is a kind of a secret tension in them. It is intermingled with a particular energy emanating from the strength of their relationship lasting for years and casting third-party observers out of their universe. It can be felt that the photographer was granted only a temporary access to their world, and that they are fully aware of how different their inner world is, how amusing or even ridiculous it may be to people from the outside. And yet they remain within this world, because there is something more fundamental to it, something other than just the ritual Reunion. They know that they can rely on each other “like on Zawisza the Black”, the proverbial Polish knight, the symbol of courage and honour. Filip Ćwik, like a genuine intruder, managed to feature the unique “support group”, in which the primacy of a community is still alive.

In the present world, communities founded on positive phenomena, rather than on superficial relationships, are rare (or perhaps just less visible?). This is a world of surprising contrasts. Among the so-called “well read people”, who represent Western civilization, we can find a considerable international association of swingers, amateurs of sexual relations with several partners. It is an entire community cultivating a ritual of a purely physical pleasure with as little emotional involvement as possible. Michael Grieve, roaming around with his camera in the English milieu of houses of assignation, prostitutes and pornography, says that this half fictional universe conveys the sense of the difficulties of meaningful human relations in a spiritually void environment. On the other hand, somewhere in West Africa, in a place completely unknown and insignificant for the media, there is a tribe, which practices young female circumcision. Ami Vitale took pictures of the village, the girls’ brothers, mothers, their tears, the primitive tools used for the surgery, and she showed totally normal mother-daughter relationships. The mutilating ritual, which we consider a nightmare, is a way for women and girls from the village to earn the respect of the local community. This ritual is considered very effective, and no matter how absurd it may seem to us, it gives those women spiritual strength owing to the respect they win as a result of it. In this context we see the absurdity of sexual rituals based on pleasure, deprived of any emotional involvement, as shown by Grieve.

Grieve’s aesthetically refined pictures are a perfect counterpart to the sterile “free” Western world where the notion of limits –of shame or intimacy not to be transgressed - no longer exist. Freedom is a relative notion. On the one hand, in democratic societies a constant drive to protect individual freedom leads to a growing social selfishness and diminishes the understanding of social contrasts. On the other hand, the same individual freedom has recently been drastically limited in the name of safety and protection against the outside threat (controls at the airports, police surveillance or private data filing by security services, etc). In the name of protecting his image, Western Man refuses to be photographed; in the name of safety, he separates himself from the poorer neighbour states, considering the rest of the world to be dangerous and deceitful. “In the insecure world, safety is a name of a game” – says the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman indicating the trap, into which we ourselves have fallen.

Although we seem not to wish to remember it, the rest of the world is incommensurably large and still penetrates our oasis of well being. Bauman also writes: “Nowadays, no country can defend its selected values on its own territory if it turns its back to the dreams and desires of people from the other side of the border”. In the terse photographs taken from 2004 to 2009 in Darfur, Sudan and in Calais, France, Kosuke Okahara gives a comprehensive illustration of Bauman’s statement. In his simple, classic, black and white photo essays, only slightly enhanced from the formal point of view, he shows images of ethnic slaughter areas and of a harbour town, which in the dreams of Sudanese and African emigrants embodies the threshold to a better life. In his work, Okahara managed to incorporate Bauman’s message conveyed in the book “Europe: An Unfinished Adventure“. Instead of becoming involved in less and less efficient methods of protecting their own territories against the inflow of foreigners, the Western democratic countries have another mission before them: to create a global community. Because of a long history of conquests, the Western Man bears a global responsibility: for the disruption of tribal stability in Africa, for ethnic cleansings, for the inflow of immigrants, and for their futures, as well.

In short, the issue is still the same – mutual acceptance for the sake of a better future, in particular in this increasingly constricted world. And it is shown that despite a growing number of new media, the role of engaged photojournalism has not diminished. The pictures taken by all the photographers presented at the No Revolution exhibition prove that we still need people who, even at their own expense and at their own risk, are ready to reach the “mass minorities”, the tribes of the 21^st century in order to enable them to communicate in the quickest way: through an image.

In comparison to the second half of the 20^th century, the present day engaged photojournalism has multiplied its facets. The old generation of photographers say that it is “engaged” often in name only. Ami Vitale prepared a beautiful photographic record depicting people suffering unbearable pain and mutilation in the Guinea-Bissau village: the contrasting light of Africa, mist, black eyes looking like precious stones, tears resembling streaming drops. These are the aesthetic means, which neutralize suffering. Only by following the descriptions of the pictures are we able to relate these images to suffering. However, in all her comments to photographs, Vitale proves to be an engaged photojournalist, who is also involved in activity undertaken to bring aid to her subjects.

There is at present much controversy about how a photographer should present people whose way of life is totally different from what he knows; if he feels that their distinct world has its own order, meaning and beauty. Should the beauty be enhanced? Should fragmentary beauty be exposed, as Michał Sita did in Iraqi Kurdistan? Sita’a photographs were taken in a country, which preserves a surprisingly ordered way of life while existing next to their fighting neighbours. They are like intellectual and scientific splinters of reflections represented by both the photographer and the anthropologist on what he saw in the eye of a cyclone. There is no narration in them; instead there is an atmosphere. There is no story about the tribal break-up and its consequences, about the economic miracle, about a perfectly functioning tiny state. Instead there is a feeling of calmness, an overwhelming and all embracing calmness.

Today, the group of engaged photographers as understood in the classic sense (that is those, who tell a story from a point of view of a “resident”) is definitely smaller. Lourdes R. Basolí spent many weeks in the capital of Venezuela, and photographed dozens of homicides and their victims before the creation of a deeply moving photo essay entitled “Caracas. The city of lost bullets”. Both the pictures and the title speak for themselves. There is no formal artifice, no compromise as the pictures show what Juan Villoro, a Mexican writer and journalist wrote about the narco-business: the shameless tendency toward instant gratification that characterizes modern life has allied itself to the impunity of the narcotics world, of the supremacy of the present moment, of the here and now, eliminates everything else. An entire local community of victims’ families cannot remain outside.

Extensive photo essays by Aleksander Chekmenev and Arkadiusz Gola are deeply rooted in their places of residence. Both artists have lived for many years in the same environment as the heroes of their photographs; both tell a story about the marginalized communities of Eastern Europe. Chekmenev portrays the miners’ community (in “Donbas”); Gola depicts the impoverished inhabitants of a mining area, social outcasts because they lost their jobs or because their houses were pulled down (in “Silesia”). An amazing sincerity emanates from photographs taken in this way. They preserve the taste of living with the heroes, and not next to them. The construction is simple, no play with colour or contrast. And yet the pictures are moving because of the subject itself: poverty without mawkishness. Poverty in Poland has been diminishing in recent years, but the poverty of already impoverished people has been increasing. If that were not enough, children inherit the poverty of their parents. In Ukraine, it is even more difficult to break this vicious circle. There, former miners live off an illegal coal extraction, but the coal trade has been taken over by the mafia. Silesia differs from Donbas. In Silesia, owing to its faster economic growth, the community spirit is disappearing. Nevertheless, what makes both photo essays special is the feeling of proximity of their heroes, their lives being set in Europe, as well as their enormous community potential. The closeness of the heroes appeals to us; the strength of their community arouses envy and makes us look at them as if we were looking at our own reflection in a broken mirror.

Zygmunt Bauman calls such people “wasted humans”, redundant in the society of the satiated and the successful. Siegward Schmitz found them while he was looking for someone else – for groups of charcoal burners already disappearing in Europe. The charcoal producers holed up in Hungarian and Polish forests represent the extreme form of outcasts, not really eager to reveal the secret reasons, which pushed them to come to this place. They are like tiny communities out of dark science fiction films, which would take up any activity to survive. But here the landscape is not gloomy; the forests are splendid and the smoke created by the extinguished coal constitutes a fabulous backdrop to picture of those, who escaped from their failed lives. Now, they literally create new lives for themselves, independent from so-called society, although they still have to sell their production to it. It may seem strange, but among all the communities marked by poverty, the charcoal burners are the luckiest ones. In Europe there are still places where one can escape. The development of the European metropolis does not imply the development of the slums or of the caste system society, as is the case in India, a country where the slums spread the most dynamically. However, it is meaningful that India is also one of the countries, which photographers are keenest to visit. Local people still do not refuse to be photographed. Mumbai is the city the photographers are most attracted to. It is a present-day example of a future gigantic metropolis, reconciling the lives of two different communities: the inhabitants of rich residential districts on the one hand, and the poor people from the slums on the other. However, Baumans’ distinction does not apply to them, as the former cannot exist without the latter, since the slums are the service quarters of the rich districts. Despite their poverty, the slums can create opportunities for certain groups. Probably, they would be the first destination of former residents of leper colonies, which Maciej Jeziorek documented in his photographs. In India, the “trash people” are the children of the lepers, a group existing outside any community, casteless, outcast, concealed behind barbed wire. In the wonderful sun and colours of India, Jeziorek discovered the beauty of this both extraordinary and meaningless community of parents ultimately lost because of their disease and of their healthy children slowly working their way towards a normal life. Yet the beauty does not cover their uncertainty, the frail foundations of their community with its strength limited to the lot of their kind. What will become of them once they disperse outside the fence of the centre?

According to Michel Maffesoli, the present “time of the tribes” is related to the decline of the individualism in Western societies. In such communities the situation of the “stigmatised” people is as uncertain as it is in a caste system society, unless they have managed to win a stronger position for themselves. In some circumstances, the exclusion can be finalised even by an institution entrusted with a mission to spread Christianity. That is what happened in the town of Szczytna where a Catholic order of the Missionaries of the Holy Family succeeded in recovering real estate - a castle, which had been home to 110 mentally disabled patients for 40 years. Adam Lach photographed them. Taking the extraordinary interiors of the neo-gothic building as the setting, he focused on everyday life and showed a laborious trudge along the paths and gestures accomplished by the patients, who are totally at the mercy of others. When one sees this particular symbiosis between the people and the place, one immediately realizes that it is impossible to transfer this kind of community into another centre because the patients would lose any feeling of security. There is no need for any further explanation to understand that many of them would not survive such a change.

In primitive societies, individualism or being distinct within a “herd” often used to give a privileged position, implying the contact of the stigmatised individual with some supreme powers. On the contrary, within the contemporary “tribes”, being distinct undermines other traits of an individual, who is thus cast outside any existing brackets. An extreme example of such a case is the story of a Polish transsexual, whom Lach accompanied for a week in her everyday private life. For her and people like her, the drama caused by rejection remains the same, no matter whether it is before or after possible surgery. Furthermore, it is reinforced by their personal, inner tragedy resulting from the lack of acceptance of their own body. The transsexuals are at risk of losing their friends, families, often their work as well. Thus transsexual associations arise out of their need to support one another in recovering their own self-esteem. Lach’s photographs show how much they miss it.

Contemporary democratic societies do not grant rights to minorities, including the political ones, by default. On the contrary, in Poland and the whole of Europe we are witnessing the rebirth of nationalist movements. One may wonder whether or not this phenomenon is linked with cultural evolution. Lem had no illusions about the development of future events: McLuhan’s vision of the Earth as a “global village” will come true but as a caricature: banal leisure spread via satellites will lead to the regression of culture. Nevertheless Bauman believes in Europe’s culture-producing capacity; in his opinion, after inventing the idea of national communities a few centuries ago, Europe now has no other choice but to create a global human community. This time, however, without conflicts, wars or revolutions.

Monika Piotrowska, curator

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Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure; Polity Press 2004 Cambridge

Stanisław Lem, Sex Wars, Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, Warszawa 2009

Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, Sage Publication 1998; first published in French “Le Temps des Tribus”, Méridiens-Klincksieck, Paris 1988 /