BEGINNING WITH MY STREETS photo exhibition through Milosz Year. Opening: 30th June 2011, 7 pm.

Beginning with my streets

1st July-31st August 2011

open: 12 pm.-6 pm, Thusday-Sunday (Monday closed)

Galeria Camelot & Galeria Fundacji Imago Mundi

address: ul. św. Tomasz 17, Kraków

ENTRANCE FREE

Four photographers with different sensitivity and approaches to photography started to read Miłosz once again. Once again, as it is impossible not to have read Miłosz in Poland, either because one was forced to do it or for pleasure. Later they followed in his footsteps - to the USA, Lithuania, through Polish, Belarussian and Italian landscapes.

They brought back excellent photographs of isolation, loneliness, emptiness, but also of an unusual intimacy with the world, of newly perceived romantic landscapes, and of painfully pragmatic space, images of dreams, flashes of a different world in a seemingly obvious landscape. This trip in four directions starts from the symbolic "my streets" in Lithuania, but its destination is unknown.

Can four such different visions together form a coherent whole? Certainly - they are permeated by the belief in the existence of a great mystery, the one which Czesław Miłosz was for decades trying to discover. There is something in these photos. There is Something.

Michał Olszewski

// POLAND // ITALY // Kuba Dabrowski

Miłosz caught up with me between Poland and Milan, while I was moving. I often travel, but for the first time I felt like an emigrant. I saw a different light, different colour of the sky, different faces and realised that all this would surround me for longer.

I was away for just a moment, but when I returned to Poland it already looked different, or maybe it was I who had changed? Neither from there nor from here, seemingly at home in both places but not completely. I looked at the photos from the time of the move and at earlier ones from Belarus and Scandinavia. They formed a pattern I had not noticed before.
As if seen through glass.
The moment of transfer.

// USA // Andrzej Kramarz

"I'm here. These two words contain everything that can be said, everything begins with them and returns to them." Thus starts "A View of San Francisco Bay." You could end up with these words, but they are the starting point (not a guide) for my journey through California. They were the reason why making a mysterious and unpredictable circle since I first read them over twenty years ago I found myself in San Francisco one night. They are the reason why I start my car at six in the morning when it's still dark, turn on the wipers and set off, trying to see something, not necessarily anything concrete, not necessarily knowing what it is. Sunrise and sunset on the coast.

Eager eyes, empty miles, lonely hours of driving, a sandwich in Drive In, coffee in 7Eleven. The brain is like a sponge - an irregular form which soaks everything up.

It's drizzling, raining, pouring. Raindrops flowing down the windscreen change the shapes of objects, trees, people - with no exception. The world is dominated by curves and blurred contours. Nothing of the sunny California and my dreams about it.

Richmond, Albany, Oakland, Alameda, Crockett, El Ceritto, Belfast, Hercules and Stinson Beach. Santa Cruz, San Mateo, San Pablo and other cities of holy, unemployed districts, straight roads, buzzing freeways. Images run through my mind like a film preview. How to understand them? How to make this journey with the aid of just a few hundred photos?

// LITHUANIA // Wojciech Nowicki

Those who visit Vilnius today hang on tightly to Remer's guidebook published three quarters of a century ago which only describes the wonders of architecture. They come with maps showing just a fraction of the city of Vilnius which they wander about. They walk as if they did not see it because they do not want to see it; they visit a place of their dreams. They look at the blue glass skyscrapers and do not realise that their own huts were humble.

In the country there is sand and rivers cut into the ground (Neris-Wilia, Nemunas-Niemen, Nevėžis-Nieważą), they are joined by streams carved into the soil like straps cutting into the flesh. In winter, snow calms everything down. Flat, white with the black water of rivers, yellow in tinge, visible only on the bends, where it smashes the ice. On the ice the locals sitting on metal boxes fish in ice holes. "Why have you come?", they ask but without anger. Here in the country very little happens. They simply want to know.

// LITHUANIA // Łukasz Trzciński

For years, like Miłosz, I have been watching people crushed by the former system in Eastern Europe. This time, however, it is not a story about citizens trampled by an oppressive system; it is rather about invaders who themselves did not want to be invaders but were forced into this role by a super power; these invaders were abandoned in the course of history in the conquered territories. Once again I focus on the‚ invaders' - in this case the Russian minority which in the 1970s was used to inhabit the town of Visaginas, built from scratch Soviet nuclear town of the future for Lithuania and the entire Soviet Union.

Items brought to the Krakow studio from the housing district gardens and suburban dachas of dream city inhabitants do not simply constitute a study of an object. They are permeated by a bitter reflection on unachievable and unfulfilled consumer aspirations and on the most basic human longing for Beauty - combined with patched temporality and recycling familiar for years and learnt at a time when this concept was still unknown. At a time when there was nothing, so everything became something. In Visaginas everyone has their own painted emeralds.