Pretty As A Picture: Rafał Milach’s Chronicle of Propaganda
Rafał Milach’s photography exhibition 'Refusal' explored the ways in which communist regimes affect the consciousness of their citizens. The show, in Łódź, paved the way to a nomination for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Rafał Milach's Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize-nominated exhibition Refusal was on display at the Atlas Sztuki gallery in Łódź in 2017. The exhibition opened with a Soviet TV programme exposing various instruments of power, whereas the exhibition's storyline was based on four series of photos taken in post-Soviet countries over the span of seven years – from 2010 to 2017. Milach was the first Polish photographer nominated for the prestigious prize.
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Rafał Milach, from the ‘Both White’ series, 2017
In 1971, Soviet television broadcast a popular science programme about the mechanisms of manipulation of people’s consciousness. Youth invited to the studio underwent a series of experiments which intended to show the audience the extent to which the power of suggestion and pressure had on an individual's perception of reality.
Even though the programme exposed strategies applied by Soviet rule, it was belittled and considered a scientific curiosity. Its revolutionary potential was completely ignored. Interested in strategies of manipulation, Milach said:
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Modern autocracies, especially those from the post-Soviet circle, have successfully implemented strategies of the collective management of citizens' awareness which were presented in the TV programme.
During his visit to Belarus, Milach was struck by the cleanliness of public spaces as well as the numerous commemorative plaques in places of honour, recognising the most productive workers, civil servants and model communist citizens. While working on his series The Winners, the photographer wanted to bring about a situation in which he would be controlled from the outside, so as to document the façade of propaganda.
These were completely new circumstances for the author of 7 Rooms, an album depicting the life of contemporary Russians, in which he showed himself to be a very engaged photographer. This time, his social interactions were limited to a bare minimum, and the heroes of his photographs were presented merely as the regime’s puppets.
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'Olga' by Rafał Milach, from the series 'The Winners', photo: Rafał Milach
When in Belarus, he photographed Olga, the winner of the ‘best mother of a large family’ competition. The woman takes care of her eighteen biological and adopted children, as well as two peacocks that they keep in the basement. Besides Olga, Milach also photographed also the best nurse, librarian, sniffer dog, kolkhoz commander, a Miss Railway winner and many others.
The photographer noted that this Belarusian propaganda machine is a kind of a game that the regime plays with society. Later, he started looking for the same patterns of propaganda in other countries.
Modernisation & abstraction
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'Anaklia' by Rafał Milach, Georgia, 2013, photo: Rafał Milach
In Georgia, Milach documented Mikheil Saakashvili’s legacy. His main focus was on the extravagant but unsuccessful modernisation projects which were started by the ex-president, who had to flee abroad after he lost the election. The picture above depicts visualisations of unrealised investments abandoned under the stands of an unfinished amphitheatre.
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The colourful fence of a holiday resort for children, Lazika, Georgia, 2013
Proposed by Mikheil Saakashvili, Lazika was a planned city located in the immediate proximity to the Abkhazian border. It was supposed to be a resort with a modern harbour. But before abandoning the project in 2012, only three parts of it were built – a town hall, a road and a holiday resort for children and teenagers.
According to Milach’s account, people in the city believe that the colourful resort right at the border was supposed to discourage Russians from possible attacks from towards the direction of Abkhazia.
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Batumi, Georgia, 2013, photo: Rafał Milach
The picture above was taken inside of the Alphabetic Tower in Batumi, which once housed the pro-Saakashvili Rustavi II TV Studio. In 2013, the then-president was accused of misappropriating funds, and the office was abandoned overnight. Its colourful rooms turned into a gigantic bird trap.
In an interview for Szum magazine, Milach noted that while implementing the reform supported by the western world, the number of political prisoners in Georgia was the highest among all of the post-Soviet countries.
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A model imitating an optical illusion, Khirdalan, Azerbaijan, 2016, photo: Rafał Milach
In Azerbaijan, he photographed the Heydar Aliyev Propaganda Centres – Aliyev was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party and the first leader of the country after the fall of the Soviet Union. The centre’s patron made his first steps of his career as a member of Stalin’s NKVD, and later, already as a party activist, he opposed Gorbachev and his policies of glasnost (openness).
In one such centre, Milach’s attention was caught by learning aids, which were supposed to ‘unmask’ optical illusions. For the photographer, they were a metaphor of propaganda strategies that cover up reality and distort its perception.
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A photo from the series 'The Winners', 2010–2013, photo: Rafał Milach
While in Belarus, Milach also wanted to photograph the best ploughman:
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It was in a faraway province, and it took me a few hours to get there from Minsk by car. Finally, when I reached the administration office, my model approached me, informed me that he doesn’t want to be photographed and left. His superior was shocked and didn’t know what to do – that was the moment when the whole system collapsed.
This was also where the photo of the fern was taken. This hard worker’s refusal happened to be the greatest disturbance to the system. It was something that cannot be captured, catalogued or classified because it eludes all planning. The title of the exhibition attracted the audience's attention to the man's symbolic gesture – by refusing to cooperate, and at the same time becoming a part of the propaganda wheel, he established his own identity.
Originally written in Polish by Michał Dąbrowski, Feb 2017; translated by AS, May 2018
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