Conflict (EN)

Conflict is divided into two parts. The first is a selection of passages drawn from literature which, writes Wojciech Nowicki, communicate something that an image is unable to show. The second section consists of short essays examining the nine photography projects comprising the 2015 Krakow Photomonth Festival’s main program, the theme of which is conflict in all of its gut-wrenching or discomfiting manifestations: geopolitical conflict, physical conflict, interpersonal conflict, conflicts of the psyche.

The result is a 248-page rumination on the ways in which these various conflicts are both documented and remembered (or else unable to be forgotten) by writers on the one hand and photographers on the other. “Often it is literature that describes conflicts much more effectively,” concludes Nowicki, somewhat subversively. “Words are defter at dealing with the intangible, with what plays out within a reader, inside the reader’s head or in that undefined something which, for want of a better word, I shall call the soul.”