Beata Bartecka Łukasz Rusznica, How to Look Natural in Photos, 2021

How to Look Natural in Photos is a book about a totalitarian system that uses photography for its own purposes. It is a consideration of the mechanism and relationships involved in looking and photographing, being the observer and the observed, the describer and the descriptor. The violence begins in the nervous system – with the impulse that passes through the body and triggers the shutter – and ends in the archive as the site of interpretation of information and images. The book also tells the story of a system of relationships involving spies, agents, guards, artificial intelligence algorithm programmers, figureheads, suspects, archivists, detainees, those accidentally captured and those who have passed on. They come into contact with each other on different planes that make up one big machine, uncontrollable and dispersed. By juxtaposing images and words torn from the order of the archive, Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica create a compact narrative structure. Although each photo refers to a specific story, woven from individual existence and intertwined with socio-political drama, although each photo is a separate visual composition, although each description speaks of different methods and circumstances – the choreography of all the elements creates a universal story that reveals the gaze of the system. The book includes descriptions of the photographs based on original archival notes and an article by Tomasz Stempowski, historian and senior curator at the Institute of National Remembrance. The publication was designed by Joanna Jopkiewicz (Grupa Projektor), Krzysztof Krzysztofiak supervised the print quality of the photographs. Editors are Ośrodek Postaw Twórczych in Wrocław and Palm* Studios. Arctic Papers is a partner in the publication.