Book: Michał Cała SILESIA AND GALICJA

It is no coincidence, then, that the author often uses long lenses which characteristically flatten the individual planes of the image. This is how Michał Cała succeeds in creating, like the paintings of great masters, a metaphor of a human fate. Unlike Brueghel in his winter landscapes, Michał Cała replaces generic groups with isolated passers-by drifting past as well as with the last people. His peculiarly epic approach stands out not only among the contemporary Polish photographers; the Silesian work can also be read as a story about the Anthropocene. Michał Cała’s photographs can be compared with those by artists from earlier eras and generations, as well as with the Silesian paintings by Jan Bułhak, Henryk Poddębski or the young photographers of today such as Rafał Milach and Michał Łuczak. The most interesting, however, is the comparison of Michał Cała’s own photographs from the various periods and areas documented by the artist. Seen from this perspective – be it an exhibition or an album – one can discern the transformations and development of both the author’s vision and Silesia itself. Comparisons with the slightly later photographs of Galicia more clearly show the clash between the catastrophic vision of Silesia and the quite idyllic picture of the Galician village. The Galician landscapes bring to mind the masters of the Kielce landscape school focused around Paweł Pierściński or the beauty of Mazovia in the photographs by Edward Hartwig. They are depictions of a pre-modern, unrealistically beautiful and harmonious world that welcomes both humans and animals; it looks like the brighter side of Silesia. However, the pictures, full of tenderness and nostalgia, are not as convincing as the Silesian photographs demonstrating the breakdown of ties between people as well as between man and nature. They seem to convey that the human fate is to gain control over the world. During his subsequent trips to Silesia, Michał Cała has begun to perceive something more than just destruction overwhelmed by coal-mining waste dumps, degraded nature and lone figures scurrying along the dirty, mud-covered streets of workers’ housing estates. In his later photographs, created already after the political system transformations, it is nature that seems to prevail. The human work is subject to the processes of entropy. Michał Cała visits the places he is very familiar with and photographs them again. The twilight of real socialism and the late-capitalist dawn of a new political system saw the collapse of factories, the demolition of monstrous structures and the emergence of colour in the black-and-white world. Michał Cała’s photographs begin to incorporate strong, colourful spots of signboards, advertisements or new car models. The grey background contrasts with the redness of bricks and the greenness of trees and grass. The colour photographs may elicit a feeling of consternation in the lovers of noble, black-and-white photography but Michał Cała’s style does not offer a dazzling show of colours like Tomasz Tomaszewski, who was accused of distorting the image of Silesia. The colour in these photographs signifies normality and daily life, as though the period of storm and stress has come to an end. It is as though the inhuman period reached its end along with the fall of communism. This ordinariness is intriguing but not as riveting as the black-and-white landscapes of the end of the world. The world is a little bit cleaner and slightly more beautiful. It is normal, just like in contemporary Poland. It is only the plant-covered waste dumps and mining damage, the artificial lakes and reservoirs, as well as the cracked and dilapidated buildings that still bring back memories of the not-so-distant past which has only been immortalised in the photographs. In this landscape, both close and distant at the same time, among objects resembling pyramids or buildings of long-lost civilisation, there drifts the photographer.

Adam Mazur
2015