How to Look Natural in Photos

Name: How to Look Natural in Photos
Brand: Sun Archive
Price: 50.0 EUR
Availability: OutOfStock

Beata Bartecka, Łukasz Rusznica

€50,00 EUR

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“How to Look Natural in Photos” is a book about a totalitarian system that uses photography for its purposes. It includes reflections on the mechanism and relationships connected with looking and photographing, observing and being observed, describing and being described. Violence begins in the nervous system, from an impulse that runs through the body and makes someone press the shutter. It ends in an archive, where information and images are stored. This basis reveals who interprets the collected data, and consequently – who controls the facts.

The book also tells the story of spies, agents, guards, AI algorithm programmers, surveillance subjects, suspects, archivists, convicts and accidentally photographed passers-by. They interact on various levels, all comprising one huge machine, inordinate and dispersed. By setting side by side images and words plucked from the order of the archive, Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica create a compact narrative structure. Even if each photo refers to a specific story, woven from individual existence and intertwined with socio-political drama, even if each photo is a separate visual composition, even if each description speaks of different methods and circumstances - the choreography of all the elements creates a universal story revealing the gaze of the system.

All the photos in the book come from the archive of the Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (IPN), which investigates the history of Poland between the early 20th century and the fall of the totalitarian system. The book contains descriptions of photographs based on archival notes and an essay written by Tomasz Stempowski, historian and archivist.