Closure

Featuring Michal Solarski Words by Nastasia Khmelnitski

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Memory and experiences long gone are the leitmotifs that emerge in Michal Solarski’s projects. The emphasis is made on moments from childhood and recreation of preserved observations through traveling, visiting places, remembering the culture and people, and even working with light and a very distinct color of the final frame. Michal developed his aesthetics to an extent when in personal and commercial projects, the photographer’s vision materializes, leaving behind the need to adapt.

Michal explains, “When I produce commercial work, it doesn't matter if it’s corporate portrait or simple product photography, I see lots of similarities to the images I shoot for my own documentary and art projects.” The research is about the change in experience through observation of places with a perception of a grown-up after all the years that have passed. At times, the realization is that nothing has changed, while occasionally, it appears that the era is gone and the transformation is colossal.

Michal Solarski is a Polish photographer who's been living in London for the past 20 years. Michal gained his Master's in Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. He participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and more. He’s a recipient of several international awards, such as Lensculture Portrait Awards, Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography, Leica Oscar Barnack, and others. In this interview, we speak with Michal about the balance of maintaining identical aesthetics in personal and commercial projects. We discuss his series Rest Behind The Curtain and Cut It Short (a collaboration with a childhood friend and a Polish photographer, Tomasz Liboska). We dive into the concepts of memory, nostalgia, the recreation of the past, and the new reality which changes the experience of places long forgotten.

‘The way we see the world is determined by our personality and by who we are as individuals. I think it translates to all our activities in life, not just what we create as artists.’

My Story

Hi Michal, so glad to have this conversation with you! How are you doing? I would like to start with the topic of balancing personal projects and commercial work. In what way do you think a photographer can ‘insert’ his vision and aesthetics into commercial projects to keep this visual balance? 

Hello, It is always a pleasure to talk about photography! The way we see the world is determined by our personality and by who we are as individuals. I think it translates to all our activities in life, not just what we create as artists. It affects the way we arrange our space, the way we carry ourselves, etc. When I produce commercial work, it doesn't matter if it’s corporate portrait or simple product photography, I see lots of similarities to the images I shoot for my own documentary and art projects. I’ve spent many years in a photo studio working with artificial lighting, using state-of-the-art digital equipment, something I don’t do for my personal work, but even in these highly commercialized images, I see many connections to what I do for my art projects like the use of colour, the way of framing the pictures, etc. One cannot be totally detached from the other.

‘The idea was to recreate the atmosphere. I was aiming to show the general feel of the place with all its colours, stillness, and quirkiness.’

Rest Behind The Curtain

The recreation period of what was behind the Iron Curtain, which you explore in this series, takes us back in time to the values and aspirations people had in the Soviet countries. The restored reality is opposed to a dreamlike state of the fairytale experiences of a child during family vacation time. Led by nostalgia and traveling back in time, what were some of the moments you wished to recreate with the series? What is the ritual you cherish the most, which you were able to reconstructure? 

Back then, in the ’80s, coming from a cold and almost monochromatically grey Poland, our travels seemed like moving to a different world. On arrival, we were always finding ourselves in warm, sunny places surrounded by a multitude of smells and colours. Making the series, I did not have any particular moments or rituals in mind. Of course, there are plenty of memories I have from this time, but the idea was to recreate the atmosphere. I was aiming to show the general feel of the place with all its colours, stillness, and quirkiness.

Cut It Short

The project was launched as a kick-starter campaign to create a book. This is your collaboration with Tomasz Liboska, a Polish photographer, which brings us back to the coming-of-age narrative and reconstruction of some of the moments both you and Tomascz experienced growing up in the small town of Cieszyn in Poland. There’s a certain tension between the notion of what youth is and what society expects it to be coming to terms with — societal norms. How did this project come about? 

We both come from a place called Goleszow. It’s a little town in Southern Poland with a population of around four thousand. It’s not a patch of dirt where nothing ever happens, but neither is it a city that offers forbidden fruit. We had our favourite spots, where we hung out together, played pool, rented videotapes, and places where you could just stick around without any particular purpose. With a bit of will and determination, it was possible to have fun there. After we moved out from there, our paths took different directions. Tomasz stayed in Poland, and I ended up in London. Oddly enough, we both became photographers, something that we never planned together. We each already had some individual work done but for years were thinking about doing the project together. It took us some time to realize that our lives could potentially be an inspiration for telling a universal ‘kids’ story. We shared the same experiences and carried the same memories, so it was only natural to work together on this subject.

‘It took us some time to realize that our lives could potentially be an inspiration for telling a universal ‘kids’ story. We shared the same experiences and carried the same memories, so it was only natural to work together on this subject.’

Could you take us behind the scenes of one of the photographs and speak about what it took to get your vision right?  

We have a lot of great memories from the making of the series. Perhaps one of the most important images was the one portraying our first sexual encounter. The scene was shot in my parents’ bedroom. They were gone for a few days, and we had the house only for ourselves for a few days. The day before the shooting, we found a girl working in a local pub who was willing to work with us. We all felt a bit awkward and stressed about the whole situation, and Tomasz and I felt a bit like filming an adult movie scene or perhaps like Larry Sultan shooting his famous images for The Valley.123

Themes

Some of the main themes you present with your work are memory, personal experiences, and nostalgia. It's accomplished through a recreation of moments and an attempt to bring together documentary and art photography and form a new narrative. The past comes to life as a dream or a perfect place to be. It's assisted by the colors and the landscapes chosen as in the projects Hungarian Sea, Rest Behind the Curtain, for example. What was paradise-like before when coming back can never be experienced the same way again. What are your main frustrations or perhaps happy realizations from 'recreating' the past? 

They varied depending on the series I was working on. For the two series you mentioned above, I chose to visit the places that hardly changed in the last decades. They are witnesses of the era long passed. Some are kept that way because of the awareness of the necessity to keep them pristine, in other cases, lack of funds to change and renovate kept them 'untouched' and slowly slipping into decay. It was heartbreaking to see.

Cut It Short, on the other hand, was almost entirely shot in our hometown. We have visited this place regularly since we left it after high school. Our families still live there. It wasn’t an unfamiliar place for us but only when we started to work on our project did we really feel we were back. We took time to loiter around, to revisit places that evoke the strongest memories and emotions. Some changed beyond recognition, some remained exactly as we remembered them. One thing is certain, the whole process was very special to us, perhaps more important than the final product in the shape of the book publication. It was a very strong, emotional experience.

A Sneak Peek

Could you provide us a sneak peek into the project you’re currently working on or some of the themes in development? 

Two weeks ago, I came back from Kazakhstan, which was the last place I visited for Rest Behind the Curtain. Now, when the project is finished, I can concentrate on what’s next. I made a decision, some time ago, to relocate from the UK, where I have been living for the last twenty years of my life, back to my home country Poland. Coming back is a big decision for my wife and me, and I’m sure that there is a long and emotional journey in front of us that will result in some photographic work. It is also the last opportunity to look back on the time I have spent in London and make a closure of the work I have produced here over the last two decades.123