The above photograph was taken in the village of Sieklówka in the Bieszczady foothills. In the recording, Józef Skiba recounts how he lost his family during the occupation, and later discovered their bodies in the woods.
In order to interpret Kramarz’s work, the viewer needs to concentrate and listen as the painful story unfolds. Understanding the photographer’s work requires patience and time. It is interesting to see how viewers change after hearing the distressing facts, and begin to see the photograph like an eyewitness. Every sentence adds new detail to the landscape, stripping away its neutrality and transparency. As Kramarz writes in the accompanying text: 'the voices of the eyewitnesses open up these spaces'.
After hearing the recordings, the titular piece of land in each photograph becomes a piece of memory that ceases to belong exclusively to those who witnessed the tragedies, and joins the collective memory. Kramarz highlights ways in which people and spaces are emotionally linked, showing how traumatic events make us establish symbolic borders around places – sometimes in order to remember, and sometimes to forget.
akramarz.com
Originally written in Polish, translated by MB, Nov 2018