124 - Michal Iwanowski

Michal Iwanowski was born in Poland and has for some years lived in Cardiff, Wales where he graduated with an MFA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. His work combines elements of the documentary tradition with a conceptual approach. In his deeply personal projects, Michal often sets his protagonists against nature and explores the relationship between landscape and memory; marking the silent passing of otherwise insignificant individuals and histories. In 2009, he won the Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographers award.

In 2012 Michal retraced on foot the three-month, 2,200km trek his grandfather made from Russia to Poland after escaping from a Russian prison camp during the second world war. Maps, family portraits and extracts from the memoir his grandfather wrote combine with Michal’s own photographs to create a meta-narrative about family, belonging, history, home, war and individual willpower. The resulting book Clear of People, was published by Brave Books in 2017, and was longlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2018.

In 2016, Michal embarked on a similarly epic walk when partly inspired by the clamour of the Brexit debacle, and partly by a piece of graffiti he had seen many years earlier reading ‘Go Home Polish’, he decided to take the demand literally and set off from his home in Cardiff to walk the 1900km back to the town of his birth in Poland. Tracing a straight line through a map of Europe the journey took him through Wales, England, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and lasted 105 days. The resulting photographs appeared at the Peckham24 festival in London as an exhibition entitiled Go Home Polish which was also longlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

On episode 124, Michal discusses, among other things:

• Brexit
• Clear of People and how doing the book nearly killed
• How it changed his photography
• Not shooting and having nothing to say for four years
• Being ‘broken’ by his M.A.
• Go Home Polish
• Characters he met on his journey

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“When I started doing my Masters I though photography had to be loud. Like David La Chapelle loud... but for me to arrive at a point where I look at these images now and I feel depth and some sort of profoundness in them, that’s what I found was the biggest achievement for me as a photographer - to actually appreciate the magic in the mundane and the simplicity. Not trying to make a show, not trying to be loud and asking for attention. That was wonderful.”