Wojciech Prażmowski
A School Trip
The work is in the shape of a small three-dimensional object, consisting of many small sepia photos, resembling school ID photos, arranged in bundles and tied with grey string. Linked together, the bundles form a shape resembling a bus, and the attached wooden wheels emphasize this gesture. The artist used an element from his private archive to create the work – a photo of his father and his school friends, taken during a school trip in 1914. It was a typical souvenir photo, portraying about thirty boys standing in several rows. The artist enlarged their faces, tied them into bundles and arranged them in the shape of a bus.
The artist marked his father’s photo with a glass plate, although – as he admits – he was not entirely sure whether the face did in fact belong to his father. The work is displayed in a wooden box resembling a coffin made of simple, wooden boards.
Wojciech Prażmowski has been consistently creating work that uses old photographs that could be found in any family album. The characters in these photos become anonymous, and simultaneously create “new stories from the past” – the moments recorded in the photographs are irretrievably gone and can no longer be recreated. The artist expresses the nostalgia evoked by old photographs. At the same time, he is convinced that the very fact of being photographed irreversibly places the captured moments in the past. They move away from the present, just like a bus transporting a school trip.