Die-In For Life-In Gaza, 18th May 2024, Old Town in Warsaw, Poland
Organized by the collectives Wschód and Kefija, it was a die-in protest commemorating 76th anniversary of Nakba - the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the war in Palestine in 1948. Particularly significant in the context of the on-going genocide in Gaza.
I'm not Rafał Milach and I'll cut my usual irrelevant yadda-yadda to say this: if you know enough of history, either of your own country or theirs, it's very hard not to feel sympathy to those folks. Listening to their stories was incredibly heart-wrenching.
Since reportage and documentary are among my strongest interests in photography, this deserves some of my attention as well.
So, for various reasons I happened to be awake as early as 4am on Sunday and I saw this huge smoke above the block of flats in my area. At first I thought it was a rain cloud, but I looked deeper and something was clearly off.
I decided to take an early morning stroll to see what was going on and saw this.
I thought it was something close to my area, but my senses couldn't stop second-guessing me. I hadn't heard any explosion. I couldn't smell anything or feel the heat. It was still damn cold minutes before sunrise.
Funny enough, a day earlier I installed Fallout Shelter on my tablet and I had a lot of apocalyptic thoughts looking at that.
What happened is that a huge shopping center in Warsaw caught massive fire. So massive it could be seen from literally anywhere in the city. No reports on injuries, but thousands of people lost their businesses, many of them family-run.
There's also a lot of political background as well as quite a sizable room for conspiracy theories, but that's for another time maybe.
Euronews's David Mouriquand has had it with "immersive exhibitions" — magnified replicas of paintings projected onto gallery walls. He says of the Van Gogh show he saw, "[It] made me want to forcibly shove fistfuls of sunflowers down my throat to make the experience end quicker," and describing the Klimt exhibition in Warsaw as "atrocious." Here's his no-holds-barred essay (read: rant) on the subject. What do you think of immersive exhibitions? Explain why in the comments.
Street performers have been a colorful part of Warsaw landscape since I remember. I sometimes photograph them, but I always have legal and ethical issues about publishing those photos.
This is one of super rare cases when a shy introvert like me had a chance to get it right.
And this fantastic gentleman was sitting in such a sweet spot of this new pedestrian bridge I just couldn’t resist. What I didn’t know at that time is that he’s a skilled guitarist, composer, and guitar instructor.
My friends - let me introduce you to the one and only John Neko.
Oookay, I think I'm done shooting random sunsets with focal lengths shorter than 75mm for the rest of this decade. I don't expect more luck like this any time soon.
23rd March 2014 as stated in EXIF. The Bell Tower Of St Anne's Church on Krakowskie Przedmieście.
Months earlier before I snapped this, the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine was nearing its end, beginning the period of a huge transition in that country. They just forced their pro-Russian president off the office and started writing entirely new page of their history.
I’ll be honest though: even though I followed the news at the time, I had no goddamn clue how incredibly significant all of that was. I can’t say I was paying attention while Russia was annexing Crimea. Everyone is a genius in hindsight but I can't say I had foresight back then.
And the 2014 me wouldn’t believe the 2024 me if I had said to him about February 2022.
William Eggleston said in the 2009 episode of BBC Arts' 'Imagine' that he has personal discipline of taking one picture of one thing. Otherwise he would have been confused about picking the better shot later.
Of course I never listen to the more experienced. I took two attempts at the same idea and now I don't know which one I should keep. I dunno, I'll toss a coin maybe.
This morning, I heard a bit about Warsaw uprising during WWII, and I realised that Warsaw sounds like "War-sav !" in Breton language, which means "Get up !" and thus I found this highly accurate.