from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 19

You Can’t Step into the Same River Twice

Rafal Milach in Conversation with Oliver Chanarin

OC I can see you. Can you see me?

RM I can see you, too. No sound?

OC I can’t hear you. Ah, now I can. Hi.

RM My internet here is bad.

OC Where are you? I’ve lost you again, hold on, let me call you back. Hi.

RM My internet is bad.

OC I can see you. Where are you?

RM Great. Hi. Bad reception. This is on my phone.

OC I think it’s working now. This is how most of my conversations start these days.

RM Sorry your face is frozen. Can’t hear anything.

OC Fuck.

RM Ah, you are back again. What did you say.

OC I said that this is how most of my conversations start these days! Agh.

RM I’m in Italy.

OC I think I knew that from your Instagram.

RM Ha ha. You’ve been spying on me.

OC We are all spying on each other on the winds of the internet.

RM I was just in London; we could have met in person.

OC I think I prefer the glitches. What were you doing in London?

RM Say again. Your voice cut off.

OC What were you doing in London?

RM Sorry, again. The signal just caught up.

OC London? What were you doing in London? And also, let me start by saying thank you for conducting this conversation in English, which is my first language but not yours!

RM No problem. London: I ran a workshop organized by Magnum. I’m now a nominee member.

OC They selected another white male?

RM Ha ha, true, but it’s slowly becoming more balanced.

OC If they really want to challenge new modes of representation then the male members would collectively resign and the surviving eight women could remake the universe.

RM Ha ha (nervously). Now I am wishing your face would freeze. That could be an interesting experiment. Regardless of gender, there are photographers I really admire in Magnum. I grew up studying their work. I think the agency is trying to re-think what it stands for, and even though what I do is slightly off mainstream interest, I think it is an interesting context for me (and for them, hopefully).

OC I’m only jealous because the committee rejected Adam and I a long time ago. Anyway, it’s been about eight years since we first met in New York and you showed me a dummy of The Winners, which I loved, as you know. Can we pause for moment to talk about your journey as a photographer since then? You were working at that time in a traditional documentary mode. And then shifting, I would say, toward a more abstract, more conceptual vocabulary. And more graphic, if you don’t mind me saying. It’s a path that I recognize form my own practice, a tendency toward reflecting on the medium of photography, interrogating the medium, reflecting on how it is used and images are distributed, and thinking about the ideology inherent in the technology itself. I know this all interests you, too. And each one of these anxieties can lead to interesting visual experiments. But is it possible that, in the process, something is lost in terms of more straightforward engagement with the world, of being a witness and being present? That is something I enjoyed at the beginning of my career and miss now. Magnum represents that mode of being in the world and that’s the attraction and beauty of it.

RM The agency tries to find new formats of storytelling. The Winners project you mentioned was my first step toward mixing both documentary and conceptual approaches. Its mostly figurative pictures, of the winners of state-organized contests placed against a propagandistic background, make this story something more than just a collection of pictures; they show that photographs are part of a bigger constellation.

OC In Nearly Every Rose..., which borrows something from Ed Ruscha in the title and the sequencing of the pictures, we have a further abstraction; significantly, you are deploying abstraction as a methodology in a highly charged political moment: civil protest on the streets of Warsaw.

RM Right. You know, this project was done within just few hours but is a part of an ongoing effort that I’ve been working on for past three years. I’m trying to deal with the political situation in Poland, which is pretty fucked up now; the right-wing populist government has been in charge for four years and we have an election coming in November and they will probably win again. Poland has been in a state of permanent anti-government protest throughout this period, more or less. In July 2017, when the work was produced, there was a series of a major protests. 150,000 people in the streets of Warsaw protested against politicizing the judicial system in Poland. I’ve been documenting it in a very straightforward way; I am in the streets documenting the protests and I don’t know what I'm actually going to do with this work, because it's automatic and spontaneous I’m responding to what’s going on around me, and I feel that I have to record it. I’m thinking about creating an open-source archive with all the images that I and other photographers have taken—not on assignment but because we feel we should be in the streets, documenting what’s happening. Outside of that, sometimes I manage to do small things that are not that figurative, or they are not a direct representation of the events. The book Nearly Every Rose... is actually one of the fragments that are a little bit more abstract. It operates with several symbols. First of all, it reconstructs an architectural situation that took place in Warsaw in July 2017. Despite the peaceful nature of the protests, the Polish Parliament was surrounded with crowd-control barriers. I took a road trip along these barriers, photographing the white roses that were put against them. So here I pay tribute to Ed Ruscha and his first photobooks. Also, the typography on the book cover refers to Barbara Kruger’s work. Finally, but most importantly, the white rose is appropriated from the anti-Nazi student organization “Weiße Rose” operating in 1940s Munich. This nonviolent symbol of resistance against right-wing populism is back, this time in the streets of Warsaw.

OC Sorry, just repeat, your face froze!

RM From “Weiße Rose”, an intellectual resistance group that operated it in Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Protesters in Warsaw bring white roses and put them on crowd-control barriers. I documented the flowers. The book in its structure reflects the physical structure of the fence. It’s a leporello (harmonica). Twenty-four images of the fence on one side of the book and portraits of the policemen guarding the fence on the other. Power structure vs. protesting crowds.

OC Rewinding back to The Winners again, let’s consider the legacy of August Sander and your camera as a kind of tool for describing the world. Sander wanted to tell a story about the community where he lived during the Weimar Republic. It was personal. But it was also universal. He wanted to describe every aspect of the society he lived in, but the rise of Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust cast a shadow over his project; defining people by type became something sinister and melancholic. So this mode of operating in the world became a lot more problematic.

RM There has been a major change in my understanding of photography since we met. Today I like to think of photography as a tool that can be used easily as propaganda; it is one of many tools. With The Winners, I didn’t try to describe the world as such, but rather wanted to point to systematic structures and to the fact that an image can be read differently depending on the environment it’s put against. So the entire story could be an affirmation of president Alexander Lukashenko’s regime if used by local authorities, but at the same time it could be a critical statement from the point of view of so-called “western democracies.” It’s quite a simple story, visually.

OC Yes, they are wonderful portraits. And the work is so accessible?

RM Because it operates with a straightforward documentary format. But, again, it is not about an individual situation or a single picture; it is about the collection and how these pictures are involved in bigger structures, such as the political apparatus. A major difference between The Winners and Nearly Every Rose is that the first one reflects the system while the other rejects it. Both projects deal with structures, but my position as photographer is different. In Nearly Every Rose I declare where I stand while in The Winners I’m invisible. I’m currently working on an exhibition for December that will collect various gestures of protest. It’s also very different from my other ongoing project called Refusal. The Winners is part of it. Refusal mostly operates with a very abstract and metaphorical language. It also represents a very clinical method of work, while Nearly Every Rose... is deeply emotional. Visually, it may not seem so, as Nearly Every Rose... uses the abstract format that I also used in Refusal. Another interesting aspect of this work is that I really lost interest in the picture; in this particular case, it was not that important that I produce great pictures, but they had to represent a certain idea put in a slightly more abstract way to intrigue the viewer. Politics is not a sexy topic to deal with through photography. On the one hand, you have a straightforward documentary, reportage, or news photography that actually creates context, and then you can bounce from it. It’s about how you create a situation that does not make you consume an image, but makes you think about what’s behind it. It’s more interactive. In most cases, people expect a certain format when it comes to the representation of politics in photography. To me, whatever shifts this canon seems interesting. Such shifts also have the potential for universalization. You could say Nearly Every Rose... is a very local story, but in fact, instead of just representing a very particular political event, it primarily refers to a gesture of protest as a tool of resistance. Think about the current Hong Kong protests: different geopolitical situation, different culture, different scale, but in the end it’s about the gestures of protest as well. It’s about how people organize themselves and manifest their resistance. I found a small fragment that represents a larger pattern.

OC The difference is that this is happening in your hometown. Does it feel more personal?

RM It’s more personal than anything I’ve done before in part because it's happening in my backyard. For The Winners and Refusal, I was mostly traveling to different countries. Post-Soviet countries are sort of my backyard as well, but in a much more distant way. In Refusal, I was analytical and tried to be transparent and to use the camera as a mirror that reflects certain systematic structures. In this work, I am positioning myself on one particular side of this conflict; this is the major difference. Refusal is critical toward the system as a tool of oppression in general, whereas in Nearly Every Rose... I’m also emotionally involved as a citizen. I can’t imagine myself not doing it. It’s because I’m totally afraid. I’m scared and that’s why I’m doing it, because I cannot agree with certain ideologies present in the streets of my own city, so it’s very much about that. Working on the collection of gestures of protest for my December show, I felt that I’m somehow failing as photographer. So I decided to use various formats that could represent this idea, from the graphic novel to animation and video.

OC Did you feel almost helpless?

RM Yeah, absolutely. Because we have been photographers for quite a while, so we think we know how this tool works. It’s actually very difficult to jump out of this box and use different formats for telling stories.

OC The box is a recurring motif in your practice.

RM To me, it’s always about the search for a rudimentary element or a basic module that can become part of more varied and elaborated structures. And what grows on top of that element depends on the story and context around it.

OC Photography was always a black box operated by a photographer according to a program that fullfils the aims of the military-industrial-entertainment complex that produces the camera. There is an algorithm working in the dark, producing the images, and we have less and less control over what is happening there, in the dark. You know, we were also thinking about the box as symbol of the unknowable when we took a box of photographic paper to Afghanistan in 2008, while embedded with the British Army. I recall reading how Stanley Kubrick created his black shiny monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey after discovering the inscrutable minimalist sculptures of John McCracken. Kubrick’s box was a symbol of unimaginable power, an alien power. The archive, broadly, is a box of another kind. When you create an open archive, like the one you are proposing about the Warsaw protests, do you ever worry about who this archive might ultimately serve? I recall how in Syria protestors devised a system of marching with their banners facing backward, so the TV cameras recorded their messages but the faces of the protesters were obscured. They didn’t want the authorities to identify the protesters, and the TV footage was a kind of archive that could be scrutinized by the state.

RM It is an interesting thought. If we put the pictures in the public domain, then we lose control over them. But even if we don’t, what kind of control over images and distribution do we actually have, since we posted them on Instagram or elsewhere online? That makes me think about how we can actually use this particular situation. What if activism could possibly become a mainstream phenomenon? Is the junction between sophisticated art gestures and something mainstream even possible? Maybe, maybe not, but such a situation would have the capacity of reaching a wider audience, becoming viral.

OC Perhaps this is more of a photographer’s dilemma, but do you try connect with a mainstream audience, using photography as a platform for political resistance, or do you take shelter in a more inward-looking art context where, let’s be honest, much less is at stake?

RM I’m inclined toward a more nuanced, sophisticated gesture. That’s my mindset. But it limits the environment that I can operate within. Can making art be a useful tool to reduce the damage?

OC When we first met there was no Instagram, no anti-social media. It’s radically transformed how photographers find an audience. Now we must consider our audience in a new way, a human hand touching a key on a computer keyboard, a finger gently sliding across the tablet, or when the light from a retina display mingles with the retina of the eye. Is this a technology that you embrace? Does it cause you anxiety? Or, to ask this another way, are the images in Nearly Every Rose Instagramable?

RM No, they are not. These images require a few lines of text and people don’t like to read such detailed posts on Instagram. In the end, Instagram is about images, right?

OC Scrolling defines our current engagement with photography. When Heraclitus said, “you cannot step in the same river twice,” he indicated that some things are unarchivable and cannot be recorded. This issue becomes apparent when you think of social-media platforms of all kinds. There is this continual flow in multiple and simultaneous directions. Photography has traditionally had a more straightforward relationship to time: it’s a placeholder of memories, a frozen slice of the past. But when an image is born digitally and lives in an endlessly scrolling feed, this connection to a point of origin in the past is less certain. The question for us is which copy to attend to and in which context: embedded tweet; forwarded to a blog; collapsed into a meme; revisited in a YouTube megamix. Do you use Instagram in your work?

RM Yes, I do. I have some followers but I am not super popular. I became more active on Instagram since I decided to delete the Facebook app from my phone because of the apocalypse the algorithm had been offering me. All, of course, generated by my likes and the selection of news and articles that I’ve been reading. So, at that point, I moved toward Instagram, where at least I see a range of content.

OC We recently sent out an invitation to photographers all over the world to send us images that they considered to be too personal or too violent or too sexual or even too quiet to post online. We got an insane amount of photographs, mostly penises and vaginas, to be honest. To sift through all this flesh we hired a content moderator who works for Facebook and is part of a team of people that is basically on the frontline of all the worst kinds of images you can imagine. They see beheadings everyday, see rape, even see people committing suicide and they’re the ones that have to determine if something is ok to publish or whether it needs to be censored. And it is ideological. Who decided that a female nipple is something evil to look at while a male nipple is fine? It’s curious to think about how we internalize the ideology laid down by the tech giants. Are you thinking about that when you are making your work?

RM Not really. Or, at least, not that I’m aware of. But I know which images would be popular on Instagram; it’s kind of predictable. Social media makes it harder to keep track, sure, but I think it’s important that we don’t ever forget about the contexts and environments in which pictures function—and continue to interrogate that.