Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland

First published in the UK in 2010 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2010 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E.

60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Cover image: Masses of Iron by Kamil Turowski

Cover design: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Emma Rhys

Typesetting: Holly Rose

ISBN 978-1-84150-246-5 / EISBN 978-1-84150-334-9

Printed and bound by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth, Wales.

STREETS OF CROCODILES

Photography, Media, and

Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland

Photographs by Kamil Turowski

Introduction by J. Hoberman

Essays by Katarzyna Marciniak

Figure 1: A Tailor Shop, downtown Łód , 1989.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Hunting for Crocodiles

J. Hoberman

Preface

Kamil Turowski

List of Photograph Titles

Photographs

1. New Europe: Eyes Wide Shut

Katarzyna Marciniak

2. Postsocialist Hybrids

Katarzyna Marciniak

3. An Act Against the Wall

Katarzyna Marciniak

4. Afterword: Pedagogy of the ‘Post’

Katarzyna Marciniak

5. Index

Left: Figure 1: On the Balcony, Łód , 1989.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The project has been generously supported by various institutions and individuals. For the funding which facilitated photographic research in the early 2000s, Kamil thanks the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ohio Arts Council. For the invaluable assistance in bringing the project to publication, we are grateful to the Dora Wood Artiste Foundation and, at Ohio University, to Dr. Rathindra Bose, the Vice President for Research, and to Dean Benjamin Ogles at the College of Arts and Sciences.

At Intellect, we owe our gratitude to the two editors, May Yao who contracted our project, and Melanie Marshall who saw it through its completion. For efficient editorial assistance we thank Emma Rhys and for a brilliant layout and design we salute Holly Rose.

David Spear’s critique, photo printing advice, and overall mentorship have infused the project with galvanizing energy and confidence. The uncompromising comments and instructions he volunteered at his ranch-size darkroom in North Carolina helped Kamil keep a parallel focus on both the technical issues, and, more importantly, on a larger, conceptual plane. The flair of creative unpredictability and the imprint of spiritual visibility in David’s photographic publications served the role of a model and inspiration for Kamil.

In 2004, upon seeing a representative sample of silver-gelatin prints, J. Hoberman, the Village Voice film critic, enthusiastically endorsed the project and offered to author a foreword for the publication. We are thrilled to have his elegant words as a poetic invitation for the readers to set out on a journey through the images.

Figure 2: The Defenders of Stalingrad Street, Łód , 1989.

We also thank Linda Kintz and Áine O’Healy for organizing our joint presentations as guest speakers at, respectively, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 2006. These live presentations were our first, important public foray whose feedback has helped shape the final format of the project.

For grant writing support for the photographs, heartfelt thanks to the late Abraham Brumberg, to Julia Lesage, and to David Spear. To Tomasz Sobieraj, gratitude for his companionship during the many photographic journeys through Łód , some of which were too dangerous to be made on one’s own. The Nazarenko family’s initiative of a trip to Wrocław proved instrumental in securing our publication’s cover image. For her initiative in promoting our project and its images, and for linking our efforts with the right publisher, we remain indebted to Anikó Imre. For insightful critiques offered for the earlier versions of the accompanying essays, collegial thanks to Mara Holt, Anikó Imre, Linda Kintz, Áine O’Healy, Amritjit Singh, Aga Skrodzka-Bates, Imogen Tyler, Marguerite Waller and Ginette Verstraete. A special thank you to Alice Bardan and Monika Wiszniewska for their superb research help; to Zofia Turowska for her conceptual inspiration and brainstorming sessions; to Marsha Dutton and Alden Waitt for their editorial mastery; and to Piotr Dzi cioł, President of Opus Film for a complimentary copy of the film Retrieval. John Passaglia and Robert Consentino have contributed their creative input for the book cover design, clearly helping strengthen its visual appeal.

Jennie Farley and Joanna Rostropowicz-Clark are the two women among our distinct backers who have known and helped our work for the longest time. Our consultations with Rostropowicz-Clark, her recommendations, astute historical comments, and particularly well-informed perspective of a successful Polish-American writer have expanded our understanding of the complexity and the sensitivity permeating the cultural territory Kamil’s photographs document and interpret.

Jennie Farley has been – to put it succinctly – the star benefactor and promoter of the project. Not only in the meaning of a fund-raiser, but – as crucially – in the role of a spiritual force, always projecting her utmost confidence in our efforts and talents. She has been our unwavering patron, providing us with a secure parameter from which we could advance our creative moves. The combination of her all embracing persuasion, her own example and her Montanan-Hawaiian perspective has lent our work the feel of a tremendously gratifying climb and surf – she has given us the strength and balance, as well as the inner peace which have made the thrill of this accomplishment possible.

Bruno Schulz’s renowned 1934 short story, ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ – obviously, a seed of life for this project – remains for us a cherished source of illumination. This fantastic piece of writing maps out an East European heart of urban darkness and projects a picture whose relevance for the region does not seem to have been affected much by the passage of time. We feel grateful for Schulz’s inspirational legacy. And for his composition of the ‘beautiful map of our city’.

Figure 3: Angels, Łód , 2000.

A selection of eight photographs from the Streets of Crocodiles portfolio appeared in the literary journal Hotel Amerika (2003),1 (2), pp. 7-23. Sincere thanks to editor David Lazar who solicited the images. A number of photographs have also been featured on several book covers: Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self (Bo ena Shallcross (ed.), Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002); East European Cinemas (Anikó Imre (ed.), the AFI Film Readers series, New York: Routledge, 2005); Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc (Eva Näripea and Andreas Trossek (eds.), special issue of Koht ja paik/Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics, VII, Tallinn, Estonia, 2008); and Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (Anikó Imre, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

Earlier versions of ‘New Europe: Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Postsocialist Hybrids’ appeared respectively in Social Identities’ special issue, ‘Emerging Subjects of Neoliberal Global Capitalism’, 12: 5 (September 2006), pp. 615-633, and European Journal of Cultural Studies’ special issue, ‘Media Globalization and Postsocialist Identities’, 12: 2 (May 2009), pp. 173-190.

Streets of Crocodiles is a product of many years of an exciting collaboration between the two of us. Whereas Kamil is the author of the photographs which express his sensibility and vision, Katarzyna first worked for the project as a darkroom assistant, and later as a consultant and a co-creator of the book. Her essays have established a symbiotic unity with the photographs, feeding on their contents and form while articulating and expanding their visual statements. This dynamic connection between the textually rich visuals and the visually charged text delivers an intellectual endeavour that we hope readers will find enticing.

Katarzyna Marciniak and Kamil Turowski

Los Angeles, 2010

Figure 1: Windows, Łód , 2000.

HUNTING FOR CROCODILES

Atget, it has been said, photographed the empty streets of Paris as though he were assisting a criminal investigation. Kamil Turowski’s disturbing and disturbingly elegant photographs of contemporary Łód are less dispassionate, even as he forages for those clues and traces that mark the site of the last century’s most terrible crime.

Turowski turns the urban landscape into an archeological dig but, unlike Atget, he is an expressionist. The slashing diagonals of his rigorously unbalanced compositions excavate the latent violence in this gorgeously dreary ghost-haunted terrain. Turowski has named his project for a story by the Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz and the photographer’s Łód naturally presents the surreal juxtapositions practiced by Schulz in his fictions. ‘Miserable intimations of metropolitan splendor’ (Schulz) notwithstanding, the city is a dump of twentieth century detritus: World War II ruins and the wreckage of communism are covered by an already decomposed and unconvincing façade of Americanization, as well as a hundred years of sad industrial grime.

In Turowski’s view, Łód is populated by blurred witnesses, blind mannequins, agonized isolatos, and phantom proles. The Jews who once constituted a third of the city’s population are long gone. There are no crocodile tears but rather uncanny evidence that the artist terms the city’s ‘crocodilian deep structure’. Everywhere, Turowski finds unconscious, reptilian-brain eruptions of anti-Semitic graffiti. Is Łód then a prehistoric swamp? A granite sink hole? Streets of Crocodiles is a walk on the wild side, an expedition down a melancholy boulevard of dreams.

J. Hoberman

New York City, 2004

Figure 1: Kamil Turowski performs Metalanguage, Łód , 1989.

PREFACE

Kamil Turowski

The main title and moodscape of this project refer to the 1934 short story, ‘The Street of Crocodiles’, by the renowned Polish-Jewish author, Bruno Schulz. Schulz set his prose in the East European provinces characterized by ‘pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old, crumbling core of the city [...] in a rich but empty and colourless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity [...] cheap jerry-built houses with façades covered with a monstrous stucco of cracked plaster.’

The photographic Streets of Crocodiles applies Schulz’s potent metaphor to the twenty-first century New European ‘hood: the post-socialist, hybridized terrain where the democratic colours