‘dirty’ by Magdalena Wysocka is a collection of found photographs that were categorized as ‘schmutzig’ (eng. ‘dirty’) by an artificial intelligence software called ‚Clarifai'. Photographs gathered in the book were found in one particular image library and date back to late XIXth century. Coming from the time of industrial revolution’s phase of rapid scientific discovery, mass production and industrialization, photographs depict nature in its pure form as well as human interventions into landscapes. In the words of Ernst van Alphen found in ‚Failed images. Photography and it’s counter practices.’: ‚‚The term landscape refers to a space in external world as well as to a representation of it. In the latter meaning landscape is a genre within figurative art. In the former meaning landscape is a material reality designed by and for humans. (...) Western culture knows two traditional topoi that locate nature outside culture. (...) The first one is that of the Biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, the place of pure nature because guilt does not yet exist, the second one is the Kantian idea of the sublime as experience that is post-cultural. When man is located with his/her back to civilisation eye to eye with wild oceans or steep mountains, he/she has an experience that is supposed to be outside the familiar possibilitiess of represenation. We call such experience ‚sublime’.’ (Copyright Creative Commons: CC-BY-NC-ND). Perhaps equally if not more important than nature as a subject matter for Wysocka’s work is the medium of photography itself. ‚dirty’ is an exploration of what in photography is usually considered unwanted or can be disregarded as imperfect. Dirt, dust, blur, scratches and cracks on negatives leave an imprint of the passing of time and give the experience of browsing the book an uncanny sense of nostalgia. ‚dirty’ is a study of how photography is transformed with time, where image is, as considered by Susan Sontag—an interpretation of the real, trace, something directly stenciled off the real, a footprint or a death mask. Faded and bleached out colors are reproduced and enhanced by combination of two printing techniques used in the production of the book: offset and risograph.

dirty

Magdalena Wysocka
Outer Space Press, 2023

120×165mm,240 pp
Offset + Risograph, hardcover
Binding: Smyth sewn with black thread, fore–edge printed
Edition of 300 + special edition