Artists Go Back to School: Polish Schools Through Photography
From nostalgic sojourns to confrontations with childhood trauma, the reasons why adult artists return to their schools vary. But when those artists pack a camera in their rucksack instead of textbooks, even cookie-cutter millennials can suddenly reveal a thousand different faces.
Krzysztof Zieliński, ‘Millenium School’
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‘Millenium School’, photo by Krzysztof Zieliński / zielinski.pictures
‘Everything must change for everything to remain the same’: the motto of Prince Fabrizio Salina, the protagonist of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, could just as easily be the artistic credo of Krzysztof Zieliński. The photographer, who became famous in 2000–03 for his series Hometown, a topographical atlas of his home town of Wąbrzeźno, has an extraordinary ability to capture both the subtle changes in Polish post-communist reality and a mood of utter immobility. Even people, once they appear in Zielinski’s work, appear frozen like insects preserved in amber.
In Hometown, the scenery of Wąbrzeźno in the period between the first phase of political transformation and accession to the European Union consists of such a wide palette of greys, pale greens and faded browns as can probably only be found in small-town Poland. It is as if time here is frozen in an eternal early spring, and the low, box-shaped tenements, as if bent under a blanket of heavy fog, hunch towards the ever-frozen, paltry grass and the pavements covered with patches of dirty snow look as if they had lain there longer than the cobbles themselves. Compared to Hometown, the Millennium School series is striking for its multiplicity and richness of colours, although the school building is from the same grey-soaked neighbourhood, under Zielinski’s lens its interior is bathed in colours worthy of a Los Angeles summer sunset.
The primary school the photographer attended, and years later documented, looks like a long-forgotten museum where, for decades, nothing has changed. It is like an edifice inured against aesthetic, political and technological changes. The dadoes are coated with thick layers of more durable than gunmetal shiny oil varnish in the colours of genetically modified lemons, limes and oranges. A portrait of Władysław Broniewski hangs on the wall next to a bearded likeness of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, and the computer room is filled with computers recalling an era when some of today’s Silicon Valley giants were still sitting in their parents’ garages writing their first programmes.
Krzysztof Pacholak, ‘School’
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Casting an eye over some of the photographs from the School series by Krzysztof Pacholak, who is almost a generation younger than Zieliński and grew up in a different reality, they could sometimes be mistaken as being from the ‘Millennium School’. We find almost the same dadoes and chairs, or a silicone dummy exhibiting its cross-section of human organs in the biology room. However, we soon discover a number of formal differences; while Zieliński usually photographs smooth, illuminated surfaces, Pacholak faces narrow windows and portrays interiors bathed in a deep chiaroscuro against the light. Zieliński prefers strictly symmetrical frames that flatten depth, whereas Pacholak prefers open and free compositions. Zieliński chooses objects unworn by time, while Pacholak, on the contrary, goes for the shabby and dirty.
The fundamental difference between the two aesthetically close series, however, lies in the very choice of schools photographed. While Zieliński returned with his camera to his own primary school, Pacholak chose an equally typical school in Chociwel in Poland’s Western Pomeranian region – one with which he has no connection. However, everything seems all-too-familiar once you enter the building, smell the floor detergents and see the chalk dust hanging in the air. The photographer specialises, among other things, in depicting so-called ‘non-places’ devoid of any special features but that are at the same time immediately recognisable and provide a sense of comfort. He treats school interiors as such a space. He goes with his camera around the building with which neither he nor the lion’s share of the audience have any associated memories and triggers an avalanche of reminiscences on both sides. These are associations with the familiar sight of almost identical rooms, colours and objects.
Karolina Wojtas, ‘Abzgram’
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‘Abzgram’, photo by Karolina Wojtas / karolinawojtas.com
If Gombrowicz were a photographer, Ferdydurke would look like Karolina Wojtas’s photographs. The twenty-four-year-old photographer’s credits include fashion shoots for both the Łódź-based, second-hand-shop lovers of the Limanka Fashion House and such industry powerhouses as Marni. Still, the most impressive of her achievements to date is the Abzgram series, in which Wojtas returns to her school memories.
Wojtas’ shots are unlike any other series about a school and, although they sometimes look completely surreal, they are brimming with spot-on observations – whether on the subject of squeezing schoolchildren into a school system that dated back to the 18th century, or on the dynamics of the peer relationships of the young. In Abzgram, everything is at once recognisable and grotesquely distorted. The chemistry room is lined with cardboard boxes held together by Sellotape; the broken back of a chair fitted on a bench hangs by a single screw. Inside the school gym, schoolchildren are arranged in intricate configurations, hanging from ladders or leaning on each other. And at the centre of the class photo there is a drone hovering in the air above the pupils’ heads and beneath the image of a patron saint and an eye with the caption ‘God sees you’.
Katarzyna Sagatowska, ‘School’
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#14 from the series ‘School’, 2002–03, photo by Katarzyna Sagatowska / sagatowska.com
Although returning to primary school in one’s mind is a human universal, some photographers are drawn back by experiences that are utterly alien to most. Katarzyna Sagatowska, photographer, exhibition curator, founder of the Jednostka gallery and publishing house, for example, visited the Warsaw Ballet School in 2002–03. In the series School, she captured the students’ preparations for their artistic matriculation exam, a time in which the work to perfect ballet moves becomes even more strenuous than usual and the atmosphere thickens extraordinarily.
In School, Sagatowska is not interested in the institution itself, nor in peeping behind the scenes like a reporter. The photographer points her lens straight at the dance floor and the students, restricting herself to black and white, dramatic contrasts, and tight frames that the dancers, caught mid-motion, seem to be springing out of. By looking up-close at the students, Sagatowska brings out the effort and dynamism of ballet classes – we see dancers tense and preparing to enter the dance floor and drained after hours of practice, torsos caught in graceful, ethereal motions and feet tearing themselves from the ground as they perform complex and physically demanding steps.
Konrad Pustoła, ‘Film School’
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When a school invites its graduates to return to it in their memory, the results can be disturbing. Film School is one of Konrad Pustoła's lesser-known photographic series – not surprisingly, given that it went unpublished in the album for which it was commissioned. In formal terms, the panoramic photographs of the snippets of the interior may be associated with perhaps the most famous series in Pustoła's oeuvre, Darkrooms, in which the photographer immortalised the eponymous rooms – rooms that facilitated casual, anonymous sex in gay clubs.
However, it was not this association that caused the editors of the jubilee album of works by professors and selected graduates of the Leon Schiller National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź to cast an unfavourable eye upon Pustoła’s offering. Instead of crowning his noble alma mater in laurels, Pustoła, as if out of spite, had decided to portray picturesque, though not necessarily representative corners whose dominant visual feature was paintwork peeling off in huge patches, as if the film school were a living creature in moult.
Tomek Kaczor, ‘School with a distance’
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photo: Tomek Kaczor / Magazyn Kontakt
However, the current reality is that the interiors of schools, though painted in the same motley colours and filled with the same equipment, look very different than they did just a few months earlier, due to pandemic restrictions (which are extremely hard to implement anywhere, let alone in a place teeming with active teens and younger children).
Back in June, Tomek Kaczor, a photographer with World Press Photo and Grand Press Photo awards to his credit and co-founder of Magazyn Kontakt, managed to document the first weeks of a school having broken from its standard routine. Kaczor's reportage, Szkoła z dystansem [School with a distance], published in the magazine, captured the first post-lockdown days of an empty primary school in Kotla, with barely a dozen pupils who had returned to classes in full pandemic gear, learning to operate cautiously, as if in a minefield, in an erstwhile familiar space.
Originally written in Polish, translated by Natalia Mamul, Sept. 2022
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