initiation

• Prize
• Photographer
  Gregory Michenaud / babel images, Poland
• Website
  http://www.gregorymichenaud.com

For all the years of politically forced amnesia, that have passed
since the WWII atrocities gravely wounded the social body of
Central Europe, the holders of the broken heritage of
multicultural Poland were that mere one per cent of its citizens,
who belong to thirteen different national and ethnic minorities.
Just a shadow of what it used to be.

Extracting their identity from the collected and piously
preserved scraps of the lost past, they’ve kept transmitting it to
daughters and sons. Even if some of them chose to assimilate
rather than integrate, they remained overwhelmed with the
fondness for particular kinds of clothes, food, songs, beliefs,
aesthetics and all these things that people long for without even
knowing why and call “roots” sometimes. That’s how we learn
our own cultures and identities.

After traveling the country and visiting minorities families in
search for images of those silent, almost invisible rites of
initiation, I have also dug into collections of photographs,
which often were presented to me. What I found were another
patterns of cultural transmission – through aged images of the
past and ancestors.

By carefully selecting the old photographs and matching them
with the present portraits of generations confronted in their
today’s environment, I am trying to show how strong and – in
the same time – fragile is that transgenerational communication
which shapes not only the minorities in Poland, but all of us
around the world.