silent stories, waiting to be told

out of the blue by kirill golovchenko

when i read about the photography triennial that's on right now in hamburg, i remembered another photography exhibition i saw at hamburg's deichtorhallen back in april. it was an exhibition of young european photographers and while much of it looked like trying-too-hard thesis projects that got barely passing grades, there were two young photographers who were doing something that got my attention. one was ukrainian kirill golovchenko. his large piece, composed of smaller photos, out of the blue, photographed on a black sea beach through a bathing ring, was whimsical and touching and with its vintagey treatment, felt like it tapped into something of the instagram-y pulse of our times, while saying something deeper about the culture of leisure time.

out of the blue by kirill golovchenko

out of the blue by kirill golovchenko

it was the first piece you saw as you came into the amazing cathedral-like exhibition space and it warranted a longer look. the girls liked it and stood before it, pointing out various whimsies to one another, for quite some time. i liked it too - plenty of whimsy and a healthy dose of strange-making ostranenie on the typical beach scene, making us see it anew. and what was a panda doing on the beach?

collection by jan brykczynski

the other photographer's work that spoke to me was jan brykczynski from poland. he photographed everyday objects in what once were grand surroundings of a palatial home that had been in his family for years. the obvious grandeur was a bit worn and shabby and the photos evoked those tropes of memory and forgetting that so often speak to me. who knows why these particular objects were collected? the stories behind them are surely long forgotten, but there's something poetic about them photographed individually on the ledge. as an object photographer myself, they spoke to me.

collection by jan brykczynski

collection by jan brykczynski

a number of the works juxtaposed the grand setting to the mundane realities of everyday life in the 21st century. ironing would undoubtedly once have been done by servants and now one must do it oneself, albeit still in the grand surroundings. and while it's not necessarily a photograph i'd like to own, it made me think of the great, sweeping swaths of history blowing through europe (and the world, for that matter), leaving everything changed.

collection by jan brykczynski

i think his work spoke to my inner collector as well. there's just something comforting about the act of gathering like objects and displaying them. the documentation of it. the gathering. the collection of memories. the silent stories, waiting to be told.