About Baluty-Baluty (text)

BALUTY_BALUTY

Baluty-Baluty is a documentary project which focuses on the life, relationships and love in families living in Baluty.

Baluty is an old (probably the oldest) district in Lodz (Poland), became Jewish quarter with the first and  by that reason oldest synagogue in the city of Lodz (Altshtot synagogue) and turned into a notorious ghetto in WW II.

‘Litzmannstadt getto’ was Europe’s second largest ghetto exeeded only by that of Warsaw.

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Baluty-Baluty is made in the two months before the start of and presented on the International Festival of Photography 2010 at the Lodz Art Center in Lodz.

It’s organized and driven by the Dutch photographer Rob Houkes in cooperation with Agnieszka Pomorska-Struszczyk, Malgorzata Martynelis, Maciek Jacóbczyk, Monika Krzesiak, Ula Tarasiewicz and six Baluty-families.

Six Baluty families in this district were photographing their everyday family life in all kind of situations focusing on love, relationships and family events in particular.

During the project we mobilized the creativity, talents, perception and life-experience from all the people involved.

We worked with different approaches and media: (analogue) photography/ lomography, digital snapshots, old family-snapshots, found footage, interiour, video, interview, cell-phones, blogging.

The project is completed by portaits of the families and family members made by the Dutch photographer Rob Houkes.

As a result of all this the Baluty-Baluty exhibition gives us a surprisingly sensitive, touching and intimate inside view of Baluty family-life.

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This project is about storytelling by using photography. It is also an investigation on other documentary approaches and tactics as well as questioning exclusive authorship in photography.

It’s based on the presumption that photography probably must be seen more as a everyday tool in every day’s life then as an exclusive art form.

It’s a low budget project in which is realised with the help of many others as the photographer/project leader only.

A careful attempt to make something meaningful out of everyday life- and family stories for participants themselves aswell for the visitors of this exhibition.

photographers:

(portrait (colour))

Rob Houkes

(family life (black and white photography))

Beata Wodzińska

Adrian Romanowicz

Marlena Romanowicz

Agnieszka Różycka

Rodzina Szubert

Kasia Nejman

Fela Ada i Łukasz

video:

Rob Houkes

Małgorzata Martynelis