A tiny selection from recent pro-Palestinian student protests in Warsaw.
Students at several Warsaw universities loudly demand them to cut ties with Israeli institutions supporting genocide in Palestine. Since the university authorities seem not be listening despite rounds of negotiations, the occupation protest at a park near the university goes on. More universitities across the country are joining in as we speak.
For me, a noob documentary snapshotter, it's a huge lesson on activism, solidarity and principles. I've never received a lesson like this when I was their age.
Took a taxi home and can finally shower and go to bed. Tomorrow morning it’s office time, Thursday is yet another bank holiday. This concludes the #CrossBorderRail thread for my trip from #Munich to #Warsaw and back. I hope you enjoyed the ride! Good night :)
Tomorrow I will travel from #Munich to #Warsaw by train. Because I can. No need to fly. ICE from Munich to Berlin, Eurocity from Berlin to Warsaw. #CrossBorderRail
#Poland's prime minister announced on Tuesday the re-establishment of a commission to look into undue Russian influence, as #Warsaw grapples with what it says is an intense campaign by #Moscow to destabilise the country.
"I issued an order on the establishment of a commission to investigate Russian and Belarusian influence on the internal security and interests of the Republic of Poland in the years 2004-2024," Prime Minister Donald #Tusk said.
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.