When Michał Szlaga’s began photographing the Gdańsk Shipyard in 2000, the project was meant to promote the site for the city. Today he says he wish he hadn't taken the photos - but that he had to document the slow death and fix the image of the renowned shipyard before its demolition.
The shipyard represents to Szlaga a dynamic landscape with industrial architecture reflecting history and its people. He has been documenting the space through photographs and video, trying to articulate his belief that the Solidarity union was not the most important part of its history. Szlaga said in an interview with the magazine Przekrój:
The post-war fate of the shipyard and the ethos of Solidarity are just a part of the history and together, they don’t even make up half of the story. In August 1920, workers held a strike that included over 2,000 participants. They were demanding one free Saturday a month and a reduction to their work hours. It became clear that August was a good month for demonstrations.
In September the album will be released and will include Szlaga's photos of the shipyards for the last 13 years. In the beginning, the project was meant to show the changes to the shipyard and tell how the area around it became a supermarket. But the photographer came to the conclusion that the story could not end in this way, and he tried to adopt a perspective where the shipyard had a fighting chance. The album is his attempt to appeal for help and to ask what else can be preserved in this area. Jacek Dominiczak, a representative of the publisher from the Karrenwall Foundation, says:
The book is a unique production that includes 270 pages of images that were selected by the artist out of thousands of shots he had taken. Authors also contribute essays to accompany the photographs. These try to explain the seriousness and strength of the questions posed by Michał Szlaga’s work.
Szlaga never interrupted his work, and for years lived on a block of land next to the old shipyard in order to photograph it:
When I go into my studio located in the former management office of the shipyard, I always have my camera with me. I have come to understand that you can’t just make one great book. History occurs in segments. It is important to me that the book shows that someone is destroying the city and that this is a bad thing. The naked eye can see in the photographs that the shipyard town is wonderful. The book is primarily about architecture, secondarily about the people, and lastly about Solidarity.
Michał Szlaga was born in 1978 in Gdańsk and is a graduate of the Department of Photography at Gdańsk’s Academy of Fine Arts. His debut exhibition featured a series of photographs under the title What Made Me? The Polska – Rzeczywistość / Poland – Reality project is a growing photographic diary that currently contains over 2,000 images.
The promotional event for Stocznia Szlaga / Shipyard Szlaga will be held at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on the 11th of September at 19:00.
Stocznia Szlaga / Shipyard Szlaga
Publisher: The Karrenwall Foundation, Gdańsk 2013
ISBN 978-83-933094-4-3
Photos: Michał Szlaga;
Essays: Jacek Dominiczak, Michał Szlaga, Adam Mazur, Waldemar Affelt;
Graphic Design: Olga Łebkowska
Sources: przekroj.pl, rzeczpospolita.pl, own materials. Author: SW, 30/08/2013
Translation: SMG 02/09/2013