© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
What about the places where you have grown up. Any memories?
Paweł Starzec (PS): I grew up in Wrocław, a city in the southwest of Poland that belonged to Germany before World War II. I spent most of my childhood in the shadow of a huge, unfinished sports complex that fascinated me immensely. I got interested in photography to get pictures of it before it gets demolished. This duality, Polish identity, in which the old German identity emerges from under the façade, was natural for me. Currently, I work on a documentary on the region I come from, which will also touch a lot of common ground with 'Makeshift' – my main focus is how the region's history was rewritten and the key elements to its current identity.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
What about photography, when did you step into the visual world?
PS: When I was 13 or 14, I became interested in my mother's Zenit analog camera, which is the standard getaway in Polish. At 15, I lied that I was an adult and signed up for an adult photography class, which allowed me to experience my first inspiration. I remember a foto cast with Alec Soth's Niagara being presented there as a novelty thing and my amazement stemmed from seeing it for the first time. Shortly before finishing high school, I started working on my first long-term project, documenting the squatters community I became involved in. Firstly rejected at photography school, while waiting for another admission, I started studying sociology while working on my photography in the meantime.
How do you cope with fast interconnections and instant sharing? How this is affecting your practice both as a researcher and photographer?
PS: I am torn. On the one hand, I try to discipline and repeat to myself that it is better to talk about something more thoughtfully; on the other, I'm impatient. Back in the days of working with black and white films, I used to dry them with a hairdryer after the film development because I wanted to see the results. Work embedded in research forces a slightly calmer approach and long waiting periods for work effects, but I am still trying to shorten them. Digital FOMO. It seems that to meet these expectations, one has to work constantly or have a massive archive of relatable works to use freely.
Beyond a photographer, you are a sociologist interested in correlations between space and its context. How would you describe your approach to the medium?
PS: I managed to find a field at the intersection of photography and sociology in which I feel comfortable. Here I have the impression that I can look for inspiration in both of these disciplines; narrative (i.e. documentary) photography linked to social contexts – such as how objects and space could tell a story about a person or people. For example, how New Topographics and what followed were able to cover the transformations of space done by human actions and turn it into a nuanced narrative on the motivations for those actions. I’m mostly focused on visual sociology, so most of the time, I feel like I’m operating in a field where I approach similar subjects from various perspectives. I refer to myself as a documentalist as I like those lines blurred – I don’t think that there’s more difference than methodology between documentary narrative photography, storytelling, and sociology, especially qualitative sociology.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
You are also a teacher. The world of the image has radically changed, it has become pervasive, endemic. What does all this mean from a pedagogical point of view?
PS: I have this somewhat weird position as a teacher, as I teach mainly in the Design faculty while I’m not a designer myself. So instead, we talk a lot about various aspects of visuality and how exactly images could be implemented in communication. I like to give an occasional nudge to Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, as he seemed to be critical of the dominant importance of visuality in interacting with the world and predicted a more complete, multi-sensory one would soon replace the sight-centered experience. Yet here we are, interacting with our peers for more than a year, mostly by visual means, in a world of visual pollution. And yet, our relationship with images only becomes more and more intense. During the last huge wave of protests in Poland I’d documented, I observed how fast viral images had spread only to be forgotten a few days later. A year after, I wonder how many of them will be remembered in a traditional sense – i.e., printed in history books or just hung on a real, physical wall. I think we’re yet to learn how exactly our collective memories interact with certain images – and how they could shape our perception of history and identity.
Today perhaps we need to learn to read images differently, but also to understand their potential, for example as a means of social interaction and community empowerment. How do you evaluate the relationship between sociology and photography? A relationship that has always existed, can we now consider it more mature? Do we have the tools for these two worlds to communicate in a profitable way?
PS: I absolutely love that you mentioned the beginning, where those two were intertwined. Yet we look at works of Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis – both of whom considered themselves sociologists – through the lens of the history of photography. Bear in mind that my perspective might be different from yours, as Polish academia relies on disciplinary divisions rather than mutual subjects, so we don’t have Visual Studies as such. Generally, we are rather entrenched - luckily, both the University I teach in (School of Form, SWPS University) and my alma mater (Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw) were designed to make a dent in that order. Having said that, I think that it’s evident that the interest and potential benefit is mutual in the case of the relationship between sociology and photography – from research methodologies and organised approach to a more nuanced way of constructing an actual story, a narrative out of the text, images, and other media to suit your point right. For the vital part of my work, I feel like I’m talking sociology to artists and arts to sociologists; there’s a lot of common ground to use from both sides. I’ve seen great sociological works done by photographers, and a great basis for visual projects done by sociologists, so – as with Hine and Riis – it’s mostly a matter of framing it.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
Your series 'Makeshift' was selected for Urbanautica Institute Awards 2020. Can you briefly introduce what motivated you to start this project?
PS: 'Makeshift' is a story about what is left after war, and/or how newly written versions of the history of a recent conflict cover the wounds it has created. My motivation to start it is anecdotal – reading Like Eating a Stone, a non-fiction book by Wojciech Tochman on post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, I was drawn by a small note on how somebody was taken to a concentration camp. Being from Poland, I’m accustomed to museums in former concentration camps, so I couldn’t help but wonder – what is in this exact place today? After brief research, I found that this camp is an operating factory and went into it. The idea to document the non-existence of memory in a material world – in Bosnia, there was more than six hundred camps, varying in conditions, size, duration and who was responsible for them, and almost none of them bear any signs of what happened there quarter a century ago – came naturally after reading ICTY court documents. I was already interested in former Yugoslavia, without any apparent reason, and long looked for a point of reference to tell a story about it. I found it somehow puzzling that war and genocide happened next to my door mere fifty years after „never again” was spoken about it, and yet I learned absolutely nothing about it in school.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
Tell us about the process and methodology behind 'Makeshift'? You also related to scholars, what is the background of the project?
PS: The whole 'Makeshift' series was created to analyze court documents and ICRC reports on the Bosnian War, and combine descriptions of camps found there with ground-level information. The series title stems from a conversation with an ICTY specialist, who told me in the early days of the project that despite my idea being right, it is impossible to implement due to the makeshift status of those places. Thus I did what I possibly could to triangulate official information with everything that could be found via empirical experience. I consider this project an equal part of research and photography work. The works of Martin Pollack, who writes about the relationship between landscape and its perception with or without the knowledge of its historical background, were a huge inspiration for me.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
It is never easy to reopen wounds. What difficulties did you encounter in interacting with local communities? To gain trust?
PS: Due to the exact reason you mentioned, I aimed to work autonomously in most places, based on my desktop research and old maps. Many of those places are a kind of a non-place now, so a passerby with a camera didn't spark that much interest – or at least not to the point of someone intervening. Much of my work has been supported by knowledge and information from Hikmet Karicić, Ph. D., a Bosnian expert on genocide and investigating wartime events. I was also supported by local NGOs dealing with reconciliation in some places, such as KVART in Prijedor. Their help was not only information but also opened some of the doors in some cases. Besides, I tried to work inconspicuously. A large part of the documented places after the end of the war became a part of the territory managed and inhabited by the party's heirs responsible for the atrocities committed in a given camp – such is the case with Prijedor, Visegrad, or Srebrenica. In some instances, I played a card of a guideless tourist. In my limited interactions, only a fraction of them was complex in any way, and I recall about five instances where it had brought any hostility towards me.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
We know that different versions of a conflict can coexist throughout history. Sometimes reinforced by propaganda, or by the need to rebuild identities. What did you learn through 'Makeshift'?
PS: That it’s easier to talk about, and make work about, a history that isn’t yours personally. Few years after I started, Beata Bartecka, a curator who did an interview with me before the first exhibition of this project, pointed out that my home city was full of objects with similar history. It didn’t occur to me. Also, as with my work in academia, I learned how much effort could be actually put in crafting a reality that purposefully obscures certain elements of history in the process of forming national identity. For example, after the Second World War, Poland used the rhetoric of "return to the motherland" in relation to my homeland, which was within Polish borders a thousand years earlier. Makeshift is a mirror image of these processes, perhaps a bit more evident, because it concerns a conflict closer historically than World War II. The most shocking for me was the encounter with one of the places where the inhabitants of the enclave in Srebrenica were executed. This place exists on two levels - virtual, where you can easily find pictures of bullet holes in the wall and the history of what exactly happened there, and material, where it is an abandoned building on a national road that largely obscures the monument standing in front of it - erected to commemorate the soldiers who fought in this war on the other side of the murdered. There isn’t much info on the monument available online, however. A similar story happens in several other places in Bosnia.
© Paweł Starzec from the series 'Makeshift'
Could you mention 3 books that are meaningful with respect to the project and your work in general?
PS: Martin Pollack, 'Skażone krajobrazy', przeł. Karolina Niedenthal, 2014, Wydawnictwo Czarne (the title in English would be something like Contaminated Landscapes)
. Ed Vulliamy, 'The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning', 2012, Bodley Head (polish publisher: Czarne: 2016)
Joel Sternfeld, 'On this site. Landscape in memoriam', 2012, Steidl (originally published in 1996, but I have a newer edition)
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