Katarzyna Marciniak and Kamil Turowski, Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland, Intellect Books, Bristol and Chicago, 2010. 176 pages, illustrations. £ 29.95, $ 60.00, ISBN 978-1-84150-246-5.

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As I examine my copy of Streets of Crocodiles—a collection of photographic and textual commentaries on Poland’s postsocialist landscapes—BBC Radio 4 announces that Polish is now the United Kingdom’s second language. This is largely thanks to the influx of Polish immigrants who arrived in the UK after the 2004 enlargement of the European Union that gave Polish citizens the right to travel and work freely in Europe.It is an intriguing coincidence, since Kamil Turowski’s photographs and Katarzyna Marciniak’s essays trace a Poland in transition from the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall (and with it Socialist Europe) to Poland’s integration into the EU and the ‘New Europe’. The authors focus  their scopic and discursive lenses on Lodz, their hometown and ‘a blue-collar urban centre with three quarters of a million people and a rich history of German, Jewish, and Russian presence’ (page 15).  

In their book Turowski and Marciniak guide us through ‘the post-socialist, hybridized terrain where the democratic colours of western consumerism clash with the monochromatic anachronisms of the old socialist reality’ (page 15). These are their ‘streets of crocodiles’, a metaphor they borrow from the title of the celebrated Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schultz’s short story that figures 1920s Eastern European pseudo-Americanism and urban decay into the ‘miserable intimations of metropolitan splendor’ (page 13, quote from Schultz). This Schultzian take on post-1989 Poland weaves together Turowski’s two decades of photographs that aim ‘to build a visual metalanguage inviting self-reflection and a critical scrutiny of the complexities of this terrain’ (page 18) with Marciniak’s three follow-on essays that accept Turowski’s invitation.As Village Voice film critic James Hoberman points out in his poetic introduction to the volume, Turowski’s urban landscape has an expressionist feel to it. His ‘rigorously unbalanced’, diagonally rendered compositions ‘excavate the latent violence in this gorgeously dreary ghost-haunted terrain’, as ‘[e]verywhere, Turowski finds unconscious, reptilian-brain eruptions of anti-Semitic graffiti’ (page 13). What is striking about Turowski’s photographs is less how they capture racist and anti-Semitic symbols and slogans adorning the tired facades and shiny new capitalist shopping shrines of Lodz than how the photographs bear witness to the desire by Lodz’s citizens not to bear witness. For, as Hoberman points out, ‘In Turowski’s view, Lodz is populated by blurred witnesses, blind mannequins, agnoized isolatos, and phantom proles’ (page 13).  

Seeing those who avowedly will not see is what startles. It is what Marciniak describes as the ‘eyes wide shut’ aspect of not only contemporary Poland but of this New Europe—an intense looking that is a not seeing because it is a looking past or a looking through, a refusal to register the eruptions of hate literally scrolled upon the landscape.In contrast to Turowski’s unseeing witnesses, Marciniak (who was Turowski’s dark room assistant on this project and who now teaches Transnational Studies) reads the slants and shimmers of Turowski’s images of Lodz not with the disavowal of her compatriots but with the self-reflection and a critical scrutiny Turowski’s images demand. She writes, ‘I consciously refuse to see it [this landscape] as a nostalgic vision of the “Old World”. I do not admire the titled angle as a fancy, symbolic representational tactic; instead, I read it straightforwardly: as a world out of sync, skewed memories from the time when I used to inhabit this landscape’ (page 96).  Marciniak’s gaze draws out for the reader the visual clash Turowski’s collection performs, between ‘the ecstatically welcomed arrival of Western, primarily American, iconography and culture that invades this dilapidated landscape’ (page 96) against the symptomatic eruption of ‘phobias targeting the unwanted others’ (page 108).

In her first essay, ‘New Europe:  Eyes Wide Shut’, Marciniak draws upon Judith Butler’s work to ‘think about how discourse injures bodies, how certain injuries establish certain bodies at the limits of available ontologies, available schemes of intelligibility’ (Marciniak, page 100). By contemplating Turowski’s images, Marciniak invites us to consider complex matrices of ecstasy, agony, and disavowal against the new and on-going cultural politics of New European inclusion and exclusion. Guided by Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the necessity to speak of, to, and with ghosts, Marciniak’s next essay ‘Postsocialist Hybrids’ analyzes how Turowski’s photographs ‘materialize the spectral power of this landscape at the heart of the New Europe’ (page 117). Honoring ‘the delicate balance between forgetting and remembering’, Marciniak wonders:  ‘How can we deal with socialist ghosts without either romanticized nostalgia or disavowing amnesia?’ (page 115).

In her final essay ‘An Act Against The Wall’, Marciniak’s analysis is guided by Turowski’s series of six black and white photographs of a man with raised hands who in each photo further disappears into a stone wall. Situating this work in the dual historical contexts of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and ‘a larger context of persistent global walling’ (through ‘processes of global “rebordering”’ that in part are creating ‘Fortress Europe’, pages 140-141), Marciniak draws on Sara Ahmed’s ideas about sliding identities and Derrida’s notion of hospitality to sketch out her own unique vision of the New European landscape. For her, the ‘fantasy of borderlessness undoubtedly clashes with the on-going creation of “the wall around the West”’ to shape a contemporary New Europe that Marciniak describes as a ‘spasmodic construction of the New European landscape, that is, the European Union’s purported desire to expand its boundaries and to include and welcome the “others”, at least rhetorically, and, simultaneously, a fear generated by what these “others” might do to us, which brings forth an immediate guarding of one’s “old” national identity’ (pages 141-142).

While taking Lodz and Poland as the specific landscapes of their interrogations, Turowski and Marciniak’s insights apply as sharply to other locals in Old/New Europe and beyond.  Marciniak pointedly makes this argument through her analysis of the similarities between Lodz’s landscape of hate that is overwhelming anti-Semitic and what she identifies as another landscape of hate—a Jewish settlement in Hebron that is sprayed with graffiti including ‘Die Arab Sand Niggers’ and ‘Gas the Arabs’ (pages 108-109).It isn’t just in post-socialist Europe or the occupied territories of Palestine where one finds such examples. We also see it directed toward ‘New Europeans’ who have moved to other ‘Old Europes’, like the UK, for example. Recall the case of the attempted pipe bombing of a Polish couple’s home in Northern Ireland in October, 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-15271940),  the anti-Polish graffiti in Thornton Heath in November, 2011 (http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2715996), and the road sign in Herefordshire that in August, 2012 was painted over with the word ‘Poland’ and, beneath this, a swastika (http://3cafa.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/possible-racist-graffiti-in-herefordshire/).

What we have with Streets of Crocodiles, then, is a beautiful book that demands that we direct our gaze and our thoughts toward the ugly landscapes of hate and its disavowal.  For these are also part of modalities of new global orders—‘Eastern’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ as well as ‘Western’—that promise progress, transparency and justice while maintaining ‘practices of ethnic, racial, and national exclusion as well as anti-immigrant sentiments and tighter border controls, strengthening all along the historical centres of privilege’ (pages 107-108).By confronting its readers with its political aestheticization of the buildings, borders, and willfully blind witnesses of Lodz, Streets of Crocodiles channels the affective power of seeing and refusing to see into an eye-opening intellectual engagement in which we should all participate.