On 28th April 2001, from the Bajkonur launching site in Kazakhstan, a rocket lifted off with the first space tourist. Dennis Tito, an American millionaire, paid Russia 20 million dollars for the trip. For a sum equal to the value of a small island, the wealthy American man felt the real state of weightlessness, but didn’t touch ‘foreign soil’. In his album-enigma, Maciek Jeziorek proposes a much cheaper alternative to the extravagant tourism in the cosmic rocket. What’s more – it actually ends on another planet.
India. A country as big as the entire European Union, is like another planet on Earth. Jeziorek’s subject is New Dehli, which has more than 20 million inhabitants. ‘A city-hell’, the photographer says, but he seems more excited than frightened.
The book is a surprise even as you try to open it. It’s really difficult to describe: a Rubik’s cube, or a puzzle with an infinite number of right answers. At first sight you notice that the directions are distorted. The up and down and left and right directions don’t work. Everything gets mixed and interwined, creating a big ‘undefined place’. There are even more enigmas.
Firstly: the title. 317 days is a reference to the duration of Vasco da Gama’s first successful trip from Europe to India.
Secondly: the form. Its eight publishing sheets have been covered by a folded, modern map of the movement of Mars towards the Earth, referencing the so-called ‘mandala’, drawn in the 16th century by Jan Kepler. As mentioned before: one does not know how to hold the book, and a change of perspective requires either the movement of the reader’s body or the album’s itself. Centerfolds are orienting points. Each of them in a direct way references the mission to Mars.
Thirdly: the photographs. Maciek Jeziorek is a technical photographer by trade. Having power over the frame, multiple outlines, free-form select, adjusting the camera’s optics to the subject is all very easy for him. All photographs were taken using a fixed 50mm camera lens, which means that the photographer had to stand very close. Almost touching the people photographed with the bulging glass. They all look directly into the lens, watching the photographer and – through him – also the reader seeing the pages in the book.
Cover of the book 317 Days to Mars by Maciej Jeziorek, photo courtesy of the artist
The people of New Dehli don’t stare at us shamelessly, they stand with their back to us, pointing to something in the sky. What is it? A rocket? Smog? The sun? Hindu gods? From the sky the photographer turns our attention to the images of sidewalks and streets, and there to rats, colourful powders, holes in red soil. Jeziorek’s photographs, colourful and taken from a close range, perfidiously break into the ‘reader’s’ perception – one has to use their sight to receive stimulants usually arrogated to other senses. 128 pages of synesthesia.
Jeziorek’s book is a journey into the unknown, a roller-coaster ride, a walk through hell without a guide. Although we are led by the hand, we have to search and find connections by ourselves. That’s how we find optical games: here’s a man carrying something with a tangle of cables and plugs, who turns out to be three-dimensional; as with stroboscopic lighting we see his face, but just a few glimpses/pages later he turns his back to us. In the crowd of images, many protagonists appear, but they always do it imperceptibly.
