Abstract
Katarzyna Marciniak and Kamil Turowski’s collaborative book project, Streets of Crocodiles, brings together Turowski’s photographs, mainly taken in his hometown of Łódź between 1989 and 2009, with Marciniak’s essays addressing the postsocialist moment in Poland. This formally innovative exploration of the changes that have occurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall juxtaposes images of anti-Jewish graffiti, which recall horrific WWII histories, decaying socialist-era housing in which most of the city’s inhabitants continue to live, and colorful billboards and advertisements promising European riches. In their acknowledgement, the authors explain that their hope was to connect ‘textually rich visuals and . . . visually charged text’. They more than succeed, and the dynamism between the photographs and essays viscerally evokes the histories, contradictions, and ambiguities that constitute and haunt the cultural and political terrain of the last two decades of Poland’s transformation from a socialist nation to a part of ‘New’ Europe. Ultimately, the book destabilizes the commonplace reduction of Poland to either its socialist past as an Eastern Bloc nation, or to its present as one of the fastest growing EU economies. Rather, through its evocation of the Second World War and present-day ‘fortress Europe’, which implicates Europe as a whole and problematizes the sharp distinctions attributed to Europe’s ‘East’ and ‘West’, the book also punctures contemporary conceptions of Europe as seamlessly uniting nations and cultures through democracy.
The first half of the book showcases Turowski’s photographs. As J Hoberman, film critic of the Village Voice, notes in his Foreword, ‘Turowski turns the urban landscape into an archaeological dig’ (p. 13). Indeed, Turowski’s images portray Poland’s present by exposing the sedimented layers of history that continue to organize postsocialist anxieties and ambitions. According to Turowski, the project’s ‘moodscape’ was inspired by Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz’s 1934 short story, ‘The Street of Crocodiles’, through its efforts to visually grapple with the grafting of the new onto, in Schulz’s words, the ‘old, crumbling core’ (p. 15). Turowski’s images thus represent what he terms the ‘crocodilian deep structure’ of Poland, or ‘the postsocialist, hybridized terrain where the democratic colors of western consumerism clash with the monochromatic anachronisms of the old socialist reality’ (p. 15).
The opening photographs are mainly black and white, starkly highlighting the affective dimension between the past and the present through light and shadows, blurred backgrounds, and sharp angles. Some of the most powerful and disturbing images expose the hatred and anti-Semitism that, as graffiti, are literally scrawled across the walls of the postsocialist landscape, recalling Łódź’s history as a once thriving Jewish community as well as the WWII Nazi death camps. In one such photograph, a man, whose body and face is blurred, turns to face the camera as he whizzes by graffiti proclaiming, ‘Jews to gas. Zyklon B’. Next to these photographs, the images of socialist era factories and smoke stacks, such as ‘A tenement building that neighbors the EC-2 power plant in Łódź’, which features two tall smoking chimneys, cannot help but chillingly recall the smoke associated with the chimneys of the death camp Auschwitz. The later images in the collection are in vivid color. Although these color photographs more clearly encapsulate the exultant promise of Western-style consumer capitalism and the entertainment industry, they nonetheless depict similar moments of transitional violence revealed by the black and white photos. For instance, ‘BP and JC’, in which a colorful statue of Jesus appears to rise up from the ground, looming large above a shiny new BP filling station, exposes the ways in which conservative Catholic nationalism has thrived in Poland in spite of the borderless world promised by European unification through capitalism.
The second half of the book, with three essays and an afterword by Marciniak, provides a provocative and poetic analysis of the disjuncture between the ‘shocking transition’ to free market capitalism and ‘the euphoria of transnational progress’ portrayed by Turowski’s photography (p. 96). Each essay begins its exploration by considering the contradictions and tensions captured by Turowski’s camera in a particular image, and continues by extending these incisive readings to a broader contemplation of emergent Polish and European landscapes. For instance, the first essay, ‘New Europe: Eyes Wide Shut’, opens with Turowsi’s photograph of the same title. The essay theorizes the ‘world out-of-sync’ that emerges in the photograph, in which the billboard promoting Stanley Kubrick’s film looms large above decrepit buildings and Polish residents who, for the most part, cannot afford the extravagances promised by Westernization. In a multifaceted reading of the image, Marciniak ties the shocking racist and anti-Semitic graffiti that should be unthinkable at the start of the 21st century, and which is largely not discussed in postsocialist Poland (as is evident in the photographs of pedestrians passing by the violent words with ‘eyes wide shut’) with the erasures brought about by the euphoric rhetoric through which the nation’s transition has been predominantly narrated. She argues that contemporary ‘landscapes of hatred’ that flourish in everyday spaces can in fact only be understood by exposing the histories that lie beneath today’s celebration of a borderless Europe (that is, years of material and psychological suffering behind the Berlin Wall), and by pointing to the ways in which racist fears and phobias are not separate from, but entangled with, the celebration of ‘New’ Europe. Along these lines, the third essay, entitled ‘Against the Wall’, begins by contemplating the Berlin Wall as a site of power and symbolic force over people’s ‘imagination, livelihood, and mobility’ (p. 140), and then links this discussion of the communist-era wall with the new walls that constitute ‘Fortress Europe’. In so doing, Marciniak refuses to relegate the place of walls in the Polish nation to its communist past, but rather takes the relationship of walls and the production of national identity and ‘tolerance’ towards others as a continual process in a moment when Poland increasingly becomes a nation where new immigrants seek employment and opportunity.
One of the most compelling aspects of the book is each essay’s serious engagement with a question posed to Marciniak and Turowski by Marciniak’s mother and family: ‘“Why depict our city in such a way? Why show its ugliness?”’ (p. 96). The essays and photographs imply that they do so as an ethical intervention into the dominant narratives of transition. For Marciniak and Turowski, this involves refusing nostalgia for a socialist past (exhibited more by the diaspora and by certain academics than the Polish populace) while, at the same time, not erasing the past through the discourses of transnational euphoria and facing the ghosts of socialism that continue to haunt the Polish nation. This is most clearly articulated in the second essay, ‘Postsocialist Hybrids’. Here, Marciniak proposes that the book’s photographs and texts work together to document post-socialism’s haunting ambiguities. She puts forth the concept of ‘postsocialist hybridity’ as enabling a ‘ghostly speaking’ that works alongside and with Turowski’s photographs, which ‘materialize the spectral power of this landscape at the heart of New Europe’.
In the growing field of postsocialist studies, through their innovative collaboration, Marciniak and Turowski have produced one of the most exciting interventions. The book will be of interest to students of photography and visual studies, as well as to scholars engaged with Eastern Europe, European Studies, and postsocialist and postcolonial theory. Moreover, it will be an invaluable addition to undergraduate and graduate syllabi in visual studies, with the essays serving as models for an historically grounded and ethically motivated reading practice.