Izabela Szczutkowska

Let's Take the Wrong Way Home

The idea that technology allows us to see at any time the places that we have never been to before, was the starting point of Let’s Take the Wrong Way Home. This is a collection of photomontage works that are representations of landscapes that do not exist. Each piece is a combination of photographs from both places that I call home, Poland and Ireland and in combination, each image constitutes an unfulfilled dream and desire for those two places to become one. Using Google Street View, I went to my hometown of Wrocław to document places of great personal significance to me. The photographs shot from the screens were taken using 5x4” black and white sheets of negative film, then processed and printed in the darkroom. After that, they were combined with photographs of natural landscapes in Ireland. Textual errors, caused by the speed of broadband, result in a hybrid of urban and rural, digital and analogue, human and non-human, present moment and moment remembered. Dislocation finds its place in between the images that emerge and the dream of reconciling these realities.

My dissertation explores the philosophy of photography developed by the writer and journalist Vilém Flusser, which was published in 1983. By that time he was already writing about what freedom meant for people living in modern technocratic societies. For photographers, Flusser suggested ‘playing against the camera’ as a way to question pre-conceptions about what photography is for. This is one of the hardest questions that I ask myself as a photographer. My research shows why photographers cannot be fully free from the effects of the apparatuses of photography. Nonetheless, I play against the camera and I am free to test the limits of what freedom means for creative practice in photography.