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.
Someday I'll write something meaningful about this photo, because I never post photos that don't have any story behind them.
For now, go help Karam and his family. He's a guy just like me, except much younger + he's unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time of history: https://gofund.me/7c433301
@RiversideBryan that picture was such a lottery I can't even. I saw that doggo while walking through a crowded area, and shot from the hip blindly. Didn't even look at the live view, lol.
(I have a personal rule of not taking photos of people based on what they're wearing, especially when it's about such a weak premise as matching clothes. But I'm sloooooowly getting better at finding stronger reasons to break this rule)
During my long May weekend in KrakΓ³w I had a rare occasion to grab a few beers with my remote teammates. We finished the evening early, but two of us decided we're not done and went for a late night walk.
Half an hour before the alcohol prohibition (yup, it's a thing in this one city in Poland!) we bought a few beers and started sipping them illegally in one of the local parks.
And guess what? Well, my teammate had a skateboard. And I had my fastest lens on my camera.
So, what happened next? Well, around 2am somewhere in the center of KrakΓ³w one IT nerd started testing his old skateboard skills. The other IT nerd sat on the ground and started stress-testing his Viltrox f/1.4 lens and an ISO setting well above 20k.
My lovely friend successfully landed a few jumps.
I missed a lot of frames because focusing late at night is hard, but a few serviceable frames happened as well.
So yeah. 90% of people will stop to look at my boring touristy snapshots and move on. I'm more excited about this spontaneous drunk session in extreme lighting conditions. π€·
Die-In For Life-In Gaza, 18th May 2024, Old Town in Warsaw, Poland
Organized by the collectives WschΓ³d 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 RafaΕ 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.
The third face of Nowa Huta in KrakΓ³w, perhaps the most surprising to me, is the "natural" one.
It takes about 50 metres of detour from the usual urban area to discover a huge grassy meadow, often frequented by locals to sunbathe and relax. It was so calm and silent my jaw dropped and I couldn't pick it up. The only thing that reminded me I was in one of most populous parts of KrakΓ³w was that thermal power plant in the horizon.
My peanut Warsaw brain keeps yapping: how come a housing estate hasn't been built here yet?
Nowa Huta in KrakΓ³w (that industrial-ish one I guess)
The other face of Nowa Huta begins as soon as socrealism is abandoned and modernism gets to be all the rage (which is somewhere between late 1950s and 1970s I guess?). I'll be honest though: I know very little about architecture and I may have made factual errors in the previous sentence. All I know is that I'm attracted like a moth to lines, patterns and geometry.
Also, in a weird way that style evokes specific images in my head. I have some kind of synthwave-like nostalgic feelings about Poland as seen by my parents in 1970s and 1980s. All of which is of course fake because I'm not forgetting who ruled the country at that time.
Built from the ground-up as a separate city to settle workers employed in the newly built steelworks (it's even in the name, which literally means 'the new steelworks'). Designed as a poster city for Soviet propagandists. Huge, industrial, pompous. These days it's one of the most populous parts of KrakΓ³w, even though it completely didn't feel that way during my long weekend visit.
I barely scratched the surface, as severe planning mistakes were made on my end. Plus I don't like taking cliche postcard photos in harsh light. But I managed to see three different faces of this place and that counts I guess.
We start with the socrealistic face. The one that dates back to 1950s and truly feels different than whatever my peanut Warsaw brain assumed KrakΓ³w to be.
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.