Imagining backwards: Backdrop For The Memory
An altered photo album by Andrzej Kramarz

On one of the photos opening the album I find the caption: Morskie Oko, 16 August, 1931. The photos are small; they would fit in the palm of your hand. Yellowed, faded - time has softened their contrast. They’re slowly disappearing.

In his poignant book Backdrop For The Memory, conceptual photographer Andrzej Kramarz hollows out space for our imagining. We like to think that the past has existence, in some important way tethered to the present by memory and its devices – photographs, videos, histories. But memory is a reconstruction. Each iteration rebuilds an evolving narrative, tenuously linked to an arrow of time.

…someone wrote down the name once more, as if to protect the information: "Schönwetter" - now without “ów”, the inflection characteristic of the Polish language. "Beautiful weather"... 

A photo album, entrusted to the bookmaker by a rabbi in Poland many years ago, documents a lost family, perhaps forgotten, now ahistorical, alive only in this archive. Kramarz painstakingly eviscerates human figures from familiar scenes of nostalgia – a picnic, a day at the beach, a bicycle ride – moments once ensconced in a mnemonic pantheon, now absent context.

And it is really beautiful. I find a slender man in most of the photos. He might be in his thirties. Around him are family, friends, a woman - maybe a fiancée, maybe a wife. Trips to the mountains, picnics, the health resort in Rabka, Krakow with the Wawel Royal Castle in the background. Winter, Summer. Poland.

In the wake of the Holocaust, survivors search for lost families – mine, like the Schönwetters, lost in Nazi occupied Poland – survived by family stories, and a stone singular grave marker. Backdrop For The Memory is a canvas upon which we can project our lost histories, the thousand ways we reconstruct those with whom we have passed time, and those utterly erased from time. Peering through the negative space into the total blackness of absented figures, our minds search for those lost in time, perhaps for time itself.

The latest date in the album is 5 November 1941. A handwritten parchment on the reverse reads: K. Rudkiewicz. It is a tiny identity photo, like for an ID card, inserted loosely between the end pages of the album; probably given as a souvenir.
Those are all the clues.

Imagining backwards, we repopulate the voids in the images in Kramarz’s exhibition and book. Negative space becomes an event horizon – as we approach, we are drawn inevitably into a timeless domain where the linear illusion of history is undone.

Now I want to mention the name of Schönwetter, so that it sounds once again. This seems to make the most sense: When people are lost, a context is lost along with those who might bring meaning to family photographs. 

Backdrop For The Memory is a bell rung, evoking the emotional experience of memory, its poignancy and its paradox.”

                  Stephen Freedman

Purchase Backdrop For The Memory  by Andrzej Kramarz on photo-eye’s website

Details:
9” x 7” /  22cm x 17 cm
72 pp. Soft binding with wings
300 copies
Art Pacifica 2022
ISBN 979-888722332-2