This title features stunning photos augmented by J. Hoberman's preface and Katarzyna Marciniak's essays. This powerful presentation of photographs of Poland from the late 1980s to the present depicts the hybridized landscape of this pivotal Eastern European nation following its entry into the European Union. A visual record of the country's transition from socialism to capitalism, it focuses on the industrial blue-collar city of Lodz – located in the heart of New Europe and home to nearly one million people. Photographer Kamil Turowski's pictures are captivating – seeming to conceal a looming threat – while Katarzyna Marciniak's accompanying text expands on the photos and the 'crocodilian' texture of contemporary Eastern Europe. A walk on the wild side, Streets of Crocodiles captures viscerally the changing landscape of postsocialist Poland.
This title features stunning photos augmented by J. Hoberman's preface and Katarzyna Marciniak's essays. This powerful presentation of photographs of Poland from the late 1980s to the present depicts the hybridized landscape of this pivotal Eastern European nation following its entry into the European Union. A visual record of the country's transition from socialism to capitalism, it focuses on the industrial blue-collar city of Lodz – located in the heart of New Europe and home to nearly one million people. Photographer Kamil Turowski's pictures are captivating – seeming to conceal a looming threat – while Katarzyna Marciniak's accompanying text expands on the photos and the 'crocodilian' texture of contemporary Eastern Europe. A walk on the wild side, Streets of Crocodiles captures viscerally the changing landscape of postsocialist Poland.
Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland
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Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland
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Overview
This title features stunning photos augmented by J. Hoberman's preface and Katarzyna Marciniak's essays. This powerful presentation of photographs of Poland from the late 1980s to the present depicts the hybridized landscape of this pivotal Eastern European nation following its entry into the European Union. A visual record of the country's transition from socialism to capitalism, it focuses on the industrial blue-collar city of Lodz – located in the heart of New Europe and home to nearly one million people. Photographer Kamil Turowski's pictures are captivating – seeming to conceal a looming threat – while Katarzyna Marciniak's accompanying text expands on the photos and the 'crocodilian' texture of contemporary Eastern Europe. A walk on the wild side, Streets of Crocodiles captures viscerally the changing landscape of postsocialist Poland.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841503349 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Katarzyna Marciniak is associate professor of transnational studies in the English Department at Ohio University. She has published on immigration, discourses of foreignness, postsocialist cultures, critical pedagogy, and transcultural cinema and literature in global contexts. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), coeditor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (Palgrave, 2007), and guest coeditor of a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on 'Transcultural Mediations and Transnational Politics of Difference' (November 2009).
Kamil Turowski, a graduate of the National Film School in Łódź and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, specializes in short films, animations, and photo narratives. His early education in English philology gives a kaleidoscopic vision to his projects. Their semantic quiverings echo literary and philosophical sources, creating new visual territories and emotional intrigue. Turowski is also the author of the Polish-English translation of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto (Oxford University Press, 1996), now part of the canon of Holocaust literature. His films and photography have received recognition and support from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Kosciuszko Foundation, Dora Wood Artiste Fund, Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowments for the Arts. Portfolio at www.FotoFabula.org.
Katarzyna Marciniak is associate professor of transnational studies in the English Department at Ohio University. She has published on immigration, discourses of foreignness, postsocialist cultures, critical pedagogy, and transcultural cinema and literature in global contexts. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), coeditor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (Palgrave, 2007), and guest coeditor of a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on 'Transcultural Mediations and Transnational Politics of Difference' (November 2009).
Kamil Turowski, a graduate of the National Film School in Łódź and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, specializes in short films, animations, and photo narratives. His early education in English philology gives a kaleidoscopic vision to his projects. Their semantic quiverings echo literary and philosophical sources, creating new visual territories and emotional intrigue. Turowski is also the author of the Polish-English translation of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto (Oxford University Press, 1996), now part of the canon of Holocaust literature. His films and photography have received recognition and support from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Kosciuszko Foundation, Dora Wood Artiste Fund, Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowments for the Arts. Portfolio at www.FotoFabula.org.
Read an Excerpt
Streets of Crocodiles
Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland
By Katarzyna Marciniak, Kamil Turowski
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-334-9
CHAPTER 1
NEW EUROPE: EYES WIDE SHUT
Katarzyna Marciniak
Two images
The border experience can happen whenever and wherever two or more cultures meet peacefully or violently. (Gómez-Peña 1995: 149).
In Turowski's view, Lód is populated by blurred witnesses, blind mannequins, agonized isolatos, and phantom proles. The Jews who once constituted a third of the city's population are long gone. There are no crocodile tears but rather uncanny evidence what the artist terms the city's 'crocodilian deep structure'. Everywhere, Turowski finds unconscious, reptilian-brain eruptions of anti- Semitic graffiti. Is Lód then a prehistoric swamp? A granite sink hole? (J. Hoberman, 'Hunting for Crocodiles', in Streets of Crocodiles [Intellect Ltd, 2010])
The poetically moody image I am offering you to contemplate first – New Europe: Eyes Wide Shut (Figure 1) – is one that I know intimately and experience viscerally. The area it depicts – one of the many similar looking districts of Lód, Poland – is a place where I grew up during the socialist era. The crooked sidewalks, walls with terribly peeling paint, mud and puddles on bumpy streets, people hauling water in buckets, the general mise-en-scène of desolation and desperation, understandably do not evoke nostalgic longing in me. Nor do such images provoke me, unlike many of my friends in the West, to romanticize the dreamy-dreary beauty of this scenery. I consciously refuse to see it as a nostalgic vision of the 'Old World'. I do not admire the tilted angle as a fancy, symbolic representational tactic; instead, I read it straightforwardly: as a world out-of-sync, skewed memories from the time when I used to inhabit this landscape. I read the presence of a poster from Stanley Kubrick's film, with Nicole Kidman's direct gaze at the spectators, against the familiar landscape of crumbling walls and exhausted human bodies as uncanny. And then there is also my mother's comment about this project that haunts me: 'Why depict our city in such a way? Show its ugliness? What's the purpose of it?' What can I do with my mother's underlying desire to 'protect' the city?
I am drawn to New Europe: Eyes Wide Shut because it compellingly visualizes the clash I want to discuss in this essay, that is, the ecstatically welcomed arrival of western, primarily American, iconography and culture that invades this dilapidated landscape. I believe it is not an exaggeration to claim that this landscape, now curiously hybridized, holds exacerbated economic hardships for the majority who can afford only to gaze at the new privileges. I think of the people in the photograph as modest urban dwellers in shocking transition between socialism and the open market economy, now functioning against the grotesque backdrop of pretensions to western commercialism.
It is against such a cultural background that I am asking you to experience the second image by the same artist, Jews to Gas. Zyklon B (Figure 2). The image is, immediately and painfully, shocking – chilling and paralyzing with its force. The paralysis the photograph asks us to feel has to do, of course, with the blatantly anti-Semitic inscription on the wall, the drawing of the skull with the crossed bones, an unmistakable sign of death. The inscription is in big letters, glaring. To see such words as 'Jew' and 'gas' together, freshly painted, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, feels unimaginable. To consider the meaning of 'Zyklon B' written on the wall in the country where the Nazi Germans created Auschwitz and many other death camps to carry out their diabolical plan to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and others deemed by them to be of 'inferior race', feels nauseating. An instinctive thought: all these terrible signifiers of hate and destruction belong to the past, to the World War II era and the Holocaust, to the genocidal time of German invasion – crematoriums, gas chambers, execution walls, gallows, death. In my memory, they belong to my childhood – my grandmother telling me how she used to hide in the country with her child, my father; how they survived on potato peels. Then, why are these words and images here now, sixty years after the war?
While I find the first image hypnotic in that, despite my resistance, it pulls me into the past, into the intimacy of my childhood, the second image suffocates me with its intensity. All my scholarly training in reading 'visual culture' fails me as I am confronted with scary messages and ominous drawings aiming to hurt and kill. I instinctively sense, though, that a passing-by family, blurred in motion, does need to be depicted as out-of-focus, a man's gaze only partially readable. I sense that this is a powerful way to comment on how the community of the city is a witness to a multiplicity of such graffiti but will not acknowledge the gravity of such words of hate. In other words, people just whiz by them, pretending they do not notice. Jude Raus(Jews out), 'Jews are Pricks', 'Negro Go Home', 'White Power', 'Jewish Pricks Get the Fuck out of Here!, 'The Hunters of the Heads of Jewish Dogs, are explosive inscriptions on the walls everywhere, including downtown, in affluent and deprivileged districts of the city alike. The only extant synagogue in town (Figure 3) is routinely covered with frightening insults like 'Fuck the Jews', 'Moses Prick, and 'Jews to Gas'. The drawings of the gallows with the Star of David hanging from it are commonplace, staring at passers-by from walls, bus-stops, apartment buildings, courtyards. The creepy presence of these images marks the place in poignant, terrible ways. How to write about this community's consistent refusal to engage the painful issues that the photographs ask us to feel, ponder, and rage over?
There is no doubt in my mind that I am approaching a topic that is shameful, touchy, extremely difficult, and inflammatory – for Poles and Jews alike, not only in Poland. The fact that there are scarcely any publications that address the subject of these visual insults confirms my fears that this is a terrain to stay away from. To complicate my subject position as a writer even further, beyond my own anger, I have to acknowledge that many Poles, including my closest relatives, will almost certainly regard my writing as plainly anti- Polish and consider me a traitor for wanting to offer a critical look at Polish entanglements in the recent processes of neoliberal globalization. Many will say that I have absolutely no right to speak about the experiences I no longer share or have access to. I no longer live in Lód, I am no longer its daily inhabitant, and have no current experiential reality, so to speak, to draw on. In other words, I am writing this essay from the safety of my academic position in the United States and hence can afford to think about the impact of globalization upon postsocialist Eastern and Central Europe abstractly. I can take pleasure in theorizing these experiences because I am supposedly safely positioned away from them.
My hometown, the second largest city in Poland, used to be a multiethnic home to Poles, Jews, and Germans before World War II. The Jewish community of Lód was the second largest in Europe. During the war, the Germans set up a ghetto here, completely sealed off from the outside world, a slave work camp that very few survived. Today only several hundred Jews live in Lód; there is one tiny synagogue and one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe.
As I struggle to make sense of the 'New European' landscape in Lód, my relatives and friends insist that the photographs like Jews to Gas depict what they believe is only a marginal issue, a benign vandalism that should not be documented and certainly not publicized. In other words, there is almost a tacit understanding that the sore subjects of anti- Semitism and racism need to be avoided and suppressed because they are considered unspeakable issues too sensitive to articulate, too difficult to touch. To touch them would require a willingness to open up a space where a multifocal analysis of a very complex and blistering social situation can begin to take shape – beyond dismissiveness, beyond averting the gaze, beyond defensiveness, beyond simplistic accusations and easy solutions, and, ultimately, beyond the fear of speaking about these matters in the open. In short, beyond the 'eyes wide shut' paradigm.
Focusing on the volatile topic of ethnic tensions and the aggressive rhetoric of hate that continues to flourish against the otherwise brisk political and cultural progress, I want to engage these chilling examples of discursive violence that speak to the old and newly mobilized fears and phobias targeting minority groups. As it has been aptly documented by various scholars and writers, ethnic tensions, specifically those that engage the bitter and difficult history of Polish-Jewish relations (Bauman 1989; Hoffman 1997; Janion 2000), are certainly not a new phenomenon. What is particularly bewildering now is how entrenched this scenery of visual insults and threats remains and how it continues alongside the wave of rapid westernization (Figure 4).
Considering this context, first I want to look at the celebratory rhetoric of globalized mobility in relation to its discursive gaps and erasures. I characterize this discourse as a 'euphoria of transnational progress' and offer a glimpse into the working of this rhetoric through ads that were circulated in prominent magazines in Poland during 2003, a period leading to this country's acceptance into the European Union. The ads I focus on featured well-known Polish public figures (mainly actresses, actors, and various intellectuals) proudly proclaiming: 'Yes, I am a European'. Exploring the discursive means by which the cultural euphoria over the European Union and NATO membership emphasizes only the prospects of newly gained opportunities, understood in terms of concrete economic privileges, I will argue that this rhetoric overshadows multiple sites of aggravated racial and ethnic oppression. This argument intertwines with the second part of my discussion, a part which feels desperately difficult to articulate: an analysis of why the topic that Turowski's photographic project explores so passionately and dramatically – racial and religious prejudice, xenophobia, and visually expressed aggression – remains un-theorized and un-talked about, a sphere, for the most part, outside widespread public scrutiny, debate and critique, a sphere of denial. I will suggest that anti-Semitic and xenophobic graffiti cannot be thought of merely as an unfortunate disfigurement of the city and sporadic acts of vandalism performed, as many claim, by isolated groups of football fans.
Because I see the pressing need to consider the pride about finally being allowed to 'enter' Europe alongside the unnerving mise-en-scène of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, I insist on approaching the issue of the graffiti via the discourse of elation. It is this discourse and its powerful magnetism that functions centrally in the construction of postsocialist, 'New European' identities, in determining new subjectivities and cultural norms that are deemed worthy and desirable. Since this discourse plays a collusive role in suppressing the need to confront and wrestle with various difficult societal issues within the nation, what remains largely unacknowledged in the case of the graffiti, is that their images and words are a spectacular symptom, a manifestation of various deep-seated and long standing ethnic and racist paranoias and phobias. Unabashed anti-Semitism, racism, crude in-your-face sexism, and homophobic interpellation, whose critique was largely kept under wraps in the socialist times, have been always violently present in cultural consciousness and public discourses (see, for example, Funk and Mueller 1993; Berry 1995; Gal and Kligman 2000). For example, Lech Walsa, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, running for the first postsocialist presidency of Poland in 1990, stressed during his campaign that he was 'a true Pole' and that other candidates should also publicly declare their origins (Philips 1990). Performing such affirmatory discursive gestures aimed at validating his candidacy, WaLsa was tapping into profoundly embedded national emotionalities: the insinuation was that a 'true Pole' meant a non-Jew.
'Jew' in Polish has been marked by an insidious injury, a complicated history of abjection. zyd or zydek (offensive diminutive), regardless of whether it addresses a Jewish person or nor, has functioned as a signifier expressing insult, degradation, contempt, pathology, scorn, accusation, vulgarism. Twenty years into the postsocialist era, the renewed wave of elation over westernization has not, thus far, fundamentally examined, questioned, and altered these attitudes.
By drawing attention to the obvious outrage that such discursive violence necessitates, I do not want to advocate, however, 'political correctness', a profoundly flawed paradigm of thinking that has already received its share of criticism (see, for example, Shohat and Stam 1994). Instead, finding inspiration in Judith Butler's ideas, I propose to think about how discourse injures bodies, how certain injuries establish certain bodies at the limits of available ontologies, available schemes of intelligibility (Butler 1993: 224).
Euphoria of transnational progress
During my recent two visits to Lód, I experienced a dizzying discourse of euphoria from my relatives and friends. They asked me if I saw the wonderful changes downtown – the many newly opened pubs, clubs, discotheques, boutiques, perfumeries, giant new stores with elegant clothing owned by German corporations, French-owned supermarkets. They asked me if I saw the wonderful varieties of food: French milk, Belgian chocolate, California wine. 'We now have everything over here like you do'; 'You don't have to bring us things from the US anymore; one can buy literally everything here!' 'We are finally in Europe!' There is a manifested sense of pride that I am not even allowed to touch; there is a genuine desire to present oneself as a 'true' European, a westerner.
To appreciate the enormous value of rapid changes that swept through Poland and other postsocialist states one needs only to remember quite recent times of complete enclosure behind the Wall, excruciating difficulties in obtaining basic food, in receiving minimally adequate health care, in traveling abroad and in being mobile generally. An option to leave the Second World could be exercised by only a few in the privileged elite; ordinary citizens did not even own passports. There is also the memory of tanks on the streets during martial law in the early 1980s, curfew, intense surveillance, the presence of military and police troops everywhere, political roundups resulting in the imprisonments of many activists, social paranoia caused by the fact that one never knew if one was informed on by her neighbour, friend, or colleague who worked for the secret police service. This was the time of rationed food, gas, shoes, clothing, information. This was the time of claustrophobic pressure, a life in quarantine.
Thus, the changes that many understandably refer to as progressive, democratic and liberatory, are truly phenomenal in their scale. Exit and entry visas and border customs are being abolished in Europe; owning a passport is no longer a matter of exceptional privilege; possibilities of studying abroad have opened up for many young people; Western European countries freely invest in and take advantage of East European markets previously closed of to foreign investors; access to mobility and information is simply unprecedented.
The ads I offer here as select examples of 'transnational euphoria' compellingly anticipate various new benefits that became available once Poland joined the European Union in 2004. Their purpose was to promote participation in the Referendum and encourage the vote in favour of joining the European Union by engaging familiar personalities that people knew from telenovellas, TV series, and TV news. The visual format of those ads appears fairly uniform: a headshot of a person whose gaze is directed at the readers, parts of a European Union flag and a Polish flag nearby. The ads aim to express sentiments of assurance, excitement and promise. Hence, this campaign foregrounded only material gains and privileges: the right to travel, to study, and to work abroad. The sphere of social attitudes and emotions outside of the arena of personal financial gains and one's social betterment remained untouched.
'I will be a traveler', says the caption for the image featuring a boy whose confident look conveys feelings of anticipation and hope. 'The European Union opens up new possibilities for us. Referendum – that's our future.'
'Yes, I am a European', says Anna Przybylska. 'Recently, I have become a mother. Hm, what can I say as a Polish mother, and soon, I hope, as a European mother? I want my daughter to be a full fledged citizen of our European Commonwealth, so that she could travel, gain education, and also work abroad – if that's what she would want. I am wishing her a career without borders or boundaries. The European Union is the future – for me and for my child!' (Kuchnia, 5 (101), May 2003)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Streets of Crocodiles by Katarzyna Marciniak, Kamil Turowski. Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsKatarzyna Marciniak Introductory Essay: Hunting for Crocodiles
J. Hoberman Preface
Kamil Turowski Title List of the Photographs
Kamil Turowski Photographs
Kamil Turowski Chapter 1: New Europe: Eyes Wide Shut
Katarzyna Marciniak Chapter 2: Postsocialist Hybrids
Katarzyna Marciniak Chapter 3: An Act Against the Wall
Katarzyna Marciniak