Ryszard Kapuściński Zachęta National Gallery From Imperium of Art 18 December 2010 – Photographs – 20 February 2011 a photographic whole, a complete, finite story. The result made possible publishing a new photo- graphic album. The Soviet pictures represent a tenth of Ryszard Kapuściński’s overall photographic oeuvre. Because of their subject matter, they live a kind of their own life, but they still fit harmoniously with the rest of the author’s work because they bear the imprint of his style, already discernible in his Afri- can or South American photos. Here, Kapuściński again beguiles us with outstanding portraits of people. He was always interested first of all in the people. Writing about them and taking pictures of them. When comparing the Soviet photographs with the African ones, I get the consistent image of a photographer operating within a similar poetics. Kapuściński almost never accompanied his pic- tures with descriptive captions — probably be- cause for him they were more than just a purely photojournalistic documentation of facts. This lack of captions is a dangerous trap for an archi- vist. I fell into it myself when I credited one of the pictures from the Ze świata album as ‘Vorkuta, 1989’, because many facts ensuing from the ar- chive’s original organisation suggested that was the case. Today, I know the picture shows a street in the city of Magadan. The year fits as well as the fact that there are millions of such streets, ‘with small wooden cottages sinking lower with each snow melt’, in Russia. Writing the captions for the photographs from Imperium, I tried to determine at least the date and the place. This Moscow, 1991 was not always possible, though. In this work, I was helped greatly by Sławomir Popowski, A flag moved by the hands holding it. Men and thanks to the fact that it was quoted in the event’s had been just a photographic travelogue or simple Kapuściński’s friend and a witness of his travels women, some barely entering life, others already newsletter Luks (‘Drohobych, spring this year, documentation of the 60,000-kilometre trip through the former USSR, and by Wojciech of age, and between them Russia, swaying with corner of Czackiego and Mickiewicza streets, the around the fifteen republics of the former USSR. Górecki, an expert on Russia. the current of a restless river. This photograph is place where Bruno Schulz was shot by a Gestapo A characteristic feature of Ryszard Kapuściński’s The selection includes two photographs from impressive. It is one of the fifty that have made up man’). We are presenting this photograph in the work is that he uses word and image in different Kapuściński’s 1979 trip to his home town of the exhibition From Imperium, a new presentation exhibition. The wall plaque shown in it has made ways. In ‘Moja przygoda z fotografią’ [My adven- Pińsk, his first in forty years. I chose from them of the photographic work of Jerzy Kapuściński. positive identification possible. ture with photography], his introduction to the close to two hundred pictures. They fit greatly First came the photo album Z Afryki / Out of Af- The remaining photographs, making up a col- album Z Afryki, he wrote, ‘Well, I can’t simultane- here and without them, the image of the ‘imper- rica, published in his lifetime, and two years ago lection of nearly 1,000 shots, were never prop- ously be doing research for a news story or report- ium’ would be incomplete. One is very clear in came out another, Ze świata [From the world]. erly described. Writing Imperium proved more age and taking photographs, I can’t be a journalist both form and content — a road with a sign say- It featured several pictures made in the years important. and a photojournalist at the same time. For me, ing ‘Pińsk’ (not in Polish anymore), with distant 1989–1991, during Kapuściński’s travels through From the Imperium photographs come from two these are completely different activities, mutually outlines of trees, clouds, a car, looming far on the republics of the (former) Soviet Union. The periods: 1989–1990 and 1991. During the former, exclusive. This is because I view the world differ- the horizon. Many of the photographs featured Zachęta show is the first major presentation of Kapuściński focuses on events in cities like Mos- ently as a reporter and as a photo reporter, I look here are from street demonstrations in Moscow: that body of work, featuring photographs selected cow or Vilnius. We also find here series of images for different things, have a different focus’. the slogans, the banners, the faces. Serving as from a total of several hundred. They were discov- from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. In many From the Imperium photographs are by no a perfect counterpoint for those are the pictures ered in Kapuściński’s archive by Bożena Dudko cases, we can only guess where a particular pho- means illustrations for the book Imperium. This from the former Soviet republics. after the artist’s death. tograph was taken. The other, much smaller, set is a standalone artistic statement. A unique emo- I think Kapuściński travelled around the Soviet Several grey envelopes and in them, strips from 1991 is almost exclusively about Moscow. tional photographic reportage, or rather photo empire first of all as a writer and his photo- of negatives and small prints of the author’s A dozen or so prints have also survived for which essay, consisting of a polyphonic collection of graphic nature prevailed only in really special favourite shots. The actual selection and the there are no negatives, and two contact prints for images featuring faces, places and events bound moments. This makes the pictures featured in way it is organised suggest it was prepared for which neither the negatives nor prints exist. That by a common denominator. The idea is similar this exhibition all the more valuable for us. an exhibition, and a much larger one than that is a great loss. as in Imperium, but the result is very different In selecting the photographs for the show, I tried which took place in the autumn of 1990 during Today, almost twenty years after Kapuściński’s because of a different view adopted on the sur- to pick as many as possible of those originally the Photography Days in Świdnica, where, in the journey around the republics of the former Soviet rounding reality. selected by Ryszard Kapuściński himself. window display of the Smyk store, twenty photo- Union, the Zachęta exhibition offers us a chance When the photographs of this series are made, graphs from Ryszard Kapuściński’s eight-month to see the life of the Imperium, as he saw it then, Kapuściński is already an experienced photogra- Izabela Wojciechowska trip around the USSR, ended in September that captured in photographic images. These several pher with his own style. I browsed through this year, were presented. In that case, claims the dozen black-and-white photographs form a unique material with great interest, wondering whether Izabela Wojciechowska died suddenly on show’s organiser, Jacek Czernik, the author had epic narrative. Viewing the exhibition, it is worth these pictures are different from the African ones. 6 December 2010. For many years she was the provided all the photos with descriptive captions, reflecting on whether these pictures have stood Photographing the Soviet empire, Kapuściński custodian of Ryszard Kapuścinski’s photographic although only one such description has survived, the test of time. They would surely have not if they went a step further: for the first time, he created archive. 2

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Coming to Moscow, Ryszard always going through the roller-coaster of Gor- brought with him a photo camera, a Nikon, bachev’s perestroika, fascinated with every if I remember well, and a Sony transistor street protest by the democratic opposi- radio. The radio was what we, the Moscow tion, with slogans like ‘Communism to correspondents, envied him more than the communists, bread to the people’ or anything else. Small, compact, with a spe- ‘Down with the KGB’, arguing heatedly over cial automatic search system and a list of how it would all end, whereas Kapuściński the several hundred stations from all over kept his cool… We talked about democ- the world that could be received with it. racy, freedom and big politics and he only We didn’t pay attention to the Nikon. To sometimes interrupted our disputes to us, a photo camera seemed a natural offer a remark about the cultural, civilisa- extension of a reporter’s work. And noth- tional, significance of washing your teeth ing more. A tool that you can create an and wearing clean shoes. It may not be illustration for a text with. If anything, we that important for the revolution itself but held a grudge against our own bosses for without it, the world will never change… not being able to provide us with anything I saw Rysiek excited like this over a photo of the kind. only once: we went to Zagorsk (today: Ryszard mentioned that photography was Sergiyev Posad) to see the Holy Trinity La- one of his great passions. But it was only vra, an Orthodox monastery miraculously his first exhibition, at a small gallery at saved from the Poles during the Time of Polna Street in Warsaw (I still have the, Troubles, which today plays a role similar to seriously faded now, invitation, with an Częstochowa’s in Poland. We saw the rem- image of Rysiek sitting on the edge of the nants of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the burial bathtub) — that made me aware of how place of Boris Godunov. But Ryszard-the- important photography was for him. That photographer was fascinated by something as a means of describing the world it was else: the rear window of an old rickety tour- equal in his eyes to literary reportage or ist bus, spattered with Russian mud, not philosophical essay. cleaned all winter… ‘Look at the texture… When today I compare Rysiek’s photo- It’s incredible’, Ryszard kept enthusing as graphs from, say, Africa with the relatively he took yet another picture. I’d give a lot to few surviving pictures from his travels find that photograph today. through the collapsing Soviet empire, what strikes me is their monochromaticity. The Sławomir Popowski former are colour-rich and sunlit — and among the latter there is not a single col- our one. Just black-and-white ones. Pure chance or a deliberate choice? I think it’s rather the latter. In their mood, these 1–5 Moscow, 1991 pictures are like the world Ryszard de- 6 Byelorus, road to Pińsk, 1979 scribes in Imperium — kind of sad. And 7 Ukraina, Drohobycz, house in the they couldn’t be different. It was us, the Florianska Street, where Bruno Schulz 4 excited correspondents, who were eagerly lived between years 1915–1941 Reportage is a genre which combines jour- he highlights the way images function in nalism, non-fiction and fiction writing. It is our mental world. Showing a ‘positive’, or marked by objectivism, honesty and factual reverse, of famous traumatic situations accuracy. A piece of reportage is a result stresses the complex issue of perception. of investigations carried out by the author, Another project, Robert Kuśmirowski’s told in a style different than dry journalistic. performance Paris–Luxembourg–Leipzig, as The colourful language of reportage makes part of which the artist made the 1,200-kilo- it possible to paint a broad context of the metre trip, uses journalistic technique in events. Lacking column-style subjectivism mischievous manner. Kuśmirowski chose to and personal tones, it is an account drawn negotiate the route riding an original 1920s up by a direct observer of the process. Re- bicycle, dressed in period-style clothes, and portage uses text and pictures, both still and his photo reportage of the trip was also in moving. It performs a reporting function, 1920s style: yellowed photographs showing but also a literary one. The contemporary the consecutive stages of his journey. mass media, with their quick montage of Film and video have huge reportage poten- images and rapid information flow, have tial. Critical art, which developed in Poland seemingly pushed the art of reportage in the 1990s, showed clearly a new goal of into the background. Taking up reportage artistic practices: besides experimenting forms, artists approach the limit of what is with the form and technical potential of regarded as artistic. Do they thus expand the video medium, artists were searching 5 the boundary of artistic expression, creat- for new means of perceiving reality. Video ing a new form of reality documentation finds its protagonists and artists interact and commentary? Can we speak of artistic with them, talking to the participants, try- reportage? How does reportage function in ing to evoke certain feelings in them. Artur the visual arts? Żmijewski’s videos such as Our Songbook While static, photography is a medium that (2003), Pilgrimage (2003) or the widely dis- offers narrative possibilities. It records both cussed Them (2007) ask difficult questions realistic and poetic images, capturing a mo- and provoke reactions. Żmijewski sets the ment or a situation. Reporting photography filmed events in motion, like in the famous — informational, journalistic — should be video 80064 (2003), where he manages to devoid of authorial commentary. It is an persuade a former camp prisoner to retat- objective, though selective, illustration of an too his forearm number. A change of optics event. It is a different case with the photo- entails a change of aesthetics. graph, a work of art, which besides informa- Reportage-like video was also present in tional and aesthetic functions carries other installations in this year’s Berlin Biennale, meanings as well. As an observer of a situ- which, under the motto of What Is Waiting ation or commentator on social or political Out There?, raised the issue of art’s imitat- events, the artist contains in the picture ele- ing reality. Starting with an exhibition of ments characteristic for the reality at hand, Adolph Mentzel’s realist graphics, the Bien- which is a procedure close to reportage. nale curator looked chiefly for documentary Olga Chernysheva’s 2007 High Road # 8 is works. All That Is Solid Melts into Air, one 6 a series of photographic portraits of immi- of Mark Boulus’s installations presented grant workers from Central Asia. Their daily at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary life, living conditions, dress and lifestyle, Art, consisted of two monumental pro- all shown in the pictures, report on and jections screened on opposite walls. The diagnose a social issue. In another work, work concerned the global economy and the artist describes the Russian society in an the mechanisms of oil trade. One of the analogous way: On Duty (2007) is a series videos was a dynamic montage of footage of portraits of white-collar workers. Pensive from the Chicago bourse, documenting the and bored with the monotony of their work, dealers’ reactions and behaviour. The other they sit in their crossing attendant booths had been made during the artist’s trip to or ticket office windows, gazing into space, Nigeria, where he filmed the statements/ their thoughts wandering away from empty manifestoes of the Movement for the desk and duty uniform. The subjects pose Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), in a convention dictated by the artist. Their a militant organisation that sabotages oil surroundings are real — drab and poorly production in the region. The lack of any furnished offices — highlighting other direct authorial commentary makes the issues noticed by Chernysheva. It is also work seem particularly powerful. The two worth mentioning her 1999 Metro. Moscow. juxtaposed images complement each other The characteristic long, always crowded — a reportage about armed militants shot escalators, the sea of the passengers’ heads in a small fishing village is enriched with and the stations’ unique architecture have the context of the Western world and its been captured in colour photographs. The markets. pictures show the people of Moscow, talk- In the visual arts, reportage has become ing about the urban tissue and the way it an interesting means of observing reality. functions. Cramped conditions, crowd and Artistic reflection stemming from record- semi-darkness are the metro passenger’s ings of human reactions and statements, daily reality. The viewer receives a photo sometimes provoked or quasi-documentary, report, a story about people. serves to tell the story of a given situation. Adapted to the visual arts, photographic This leads to broader conclusions about reportage makes formal variations pos- contemporary society and culture. So can sible. This way, the artist draws the viewer’s we speak of artistic reportage as one of the attention to other aspects and meanings of forms of the artist’s observation of, and reportage photography as well as emphasis- interaction with, reality? The analysis of ing the greater significance of the image in a given issue and depiction of its greater contemporary culture. Zbigniew Libera’s significance through photography, film, 2002–2003 Positives consist of photographs video, installation or painting (e.g. the ‘pop staged to resemble iconic documentary banalism’ of Wilhelm Sasnal or Marcin Ma- shots, such as The Death of Che Guevara ciejowski) is presented in the gallery context. (1967) or Vietnam Napalm Girl (1972). The The introduction of forms from outside the reactions to the work were mixed — for dominant high-brow canon makes it pos- some, it is scandalous. Libera directly al- sible to signal issues previously ignored, or ludes to certain images, journalistic photos, over-aestheticised, in art. that function in the viewer’s mind. Manipu- 7 lating the capacities of human memory, Anna Tomczak Ryszard Kapuściński — writer, reporter and journalist in his studio in Warsaw. In the background, a map of the journey through the Soviet Union he made when working on Imperium, 1990. Photo Krzysztof Wojcik/FORUM

In 1986, Ryszard Kapuściński wrote down Like the greatest practitioners of the genre casting their vote for those who fought with a citizen of the world, is opposed to sepa- Stanisław Brzozowski’s sentence from 76 — Curzio Malaparte or Ksawery Pruszyński greater vigour, greater will to win. They want rating ourselves from Others, closing the years ago in his diary: ‘God! God! it’s really — Kapuściński was an alert observer of the to surrender to the strongest, so as to feel gates shut for them. Xenophobia, he seems hard to be a Pole today, to want to think, to dialectic of necessity and chance in mo- stronger themselves.’ to be saying, is a disease of the anxious, want to work’. Indeed, it was not easy for ments when history has been unleashed. He understood that this is how nazism may those suffering from an inferiority complex, Ryszard Kapuściński, neither then, during He was fascinated by Russia and other parts have been born. He repeated after Karol frightened by the prospect of examining the gloomy and oppressive time of martial of the Soviet Union. The Kirghiz Dismounts Ludwik Koniński: ‘A lower-class movement, themselves in the mirror of Other cultures. law, nor earlier nor later. And yet all his life is a portrait of Soviet-style modernisation in crude, off-putting, eternal type who wants to Ryszard Kapuściński’s work as a whole is he worked, thought and wrote. He cre- a Central Asian part of the empire. Imper- beat, beat anyone.’ about building mirrors in which we can see ated a unique body of work — a narrative ium is a story about bad history and the Indeed: an eternal type… Rysiek was truly as ourselves more clearly and distinctly. about the world of those excluded from the collapse of the Soviet Union. He notes aptly great at reading as he was at writing. He was not only a great writer and unique world, as seen from the Polish perspective, that the non-violence principle dominated He saw Poland everywhere, like Ksawery witness of his time. He was also a very wise written in Polish by a Polish writer. Ryszard whereas ‘today blood flows only where blind Pruszyński, whose work he held in very high man. He understood and explained to us Kapuściński’s work belongs to the most nationalism enters the fray, or zoological regard. As a result, the Polish vision is today that ‘our world, seemingly global, is in real- important tokens of Polish presence at the racism, or religious fundamentalism’.** becoming an irremovable part of univer- ity a planet of thousands of the most varied heights of contemporary culture. Having witnessed so many revolutions, sal culture. Just as Karol Wojtyła’s vision and never intersecting provinces. A trip He came from Polish poverty, from Pińsk. Kapuściński understood a great deal about from St Peter’s Basilica; Czesław Miłosz’s around the world is a journey from backwa- He told me once that he wanted to write them. He understood that the winners are visions from San Francisco Bay; the visions ter to backwater, each of which considers a book about the town to repay what he those who ‘arrive later. Often people from of Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds; itself, in its isolation, a shining star’.*** owed to his own roots. It is a great pity he the back rows or from the most remote Zbigniew Herbert’s visions of Mr Cogito’s did not live to do it. What he did succeed in parts of the countryside. The revolution condition. Adam Michnik doing was write a great — worthy of Gogol’s devours all those who stood too close to Ryszard Kapuściński was a rare in Polish pen — account of a trip to Pińsk. the barricade on either side. … The paradox culture example of a cosmo-Polish writer. This text is an abbreviated and modified version of Ryszard Kapuściński understood very well of this situation, which, like a sinking ship, The cosmo-Polish Kapuściński wants to the essay Rysiek dobry i mądry published in Gazeta ‘those moments when calm, deep waters takes everyone down with it.’ know Others, because he understands that Wyborcza, 27–28 January 2007 begin to churn and bubble into general He understood that ‘in politics, the win- in order to know ourselves better we need chaos, confusion, frantic anarchy’, when ‘it ners are often those who at all cost, without to know Others, because they are the mirror * Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun, is easy to perish by accident, because some- ethical scruples or mercy — want to win. in which we examine ourselves. He realises Vintage 2002, p. 78. one didn’t hear something fully or didn’t Politics calls firmly for pressure, aggres- that in order to understand ourselves better ** Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium, Vintage 1995, notice something in time. On such days, the siveness. Everybody knows who wants we need to understand Others, to be able to p. 323. accidental is king; it becomes history’s true to seize power, they feel it. They become compare, measure ourselves against them, *** Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun, determinant and master’.* hypnotised by it and watch the wrestlers, confront ourselves with them. Kapuściński, p. 171.

exhibition leaflet sponsors of the exhibition sponsors of the gallery 18.12.2010 – 20.02.2011 edited by Anna Tomczak, Izabela Wojciechowska curators Rene Maisner, Izabela Wojciechowska, photographs if not otherwise noted: photo Ryszard Anna Tomczak (Zachęta) Kapuściński © copyright by the Estate of Ryszard Kapuściński execution Krystyna Sielska and staff graphic design Dorota Karaszewska film programme accompanying the exhibition translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak sponsors of the opening ceremony Zachęta National Gallery of Art Magdalena Komornicka, Anna Tomczak layout execution Krzysztof Łukawski pl. Małachowskiego 3, 00-916 Warsaw printed by Argraf, Warszawa director Hanna Wróblewska © Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warszawa 2010 media patronage www.zacheta.art.pl