BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

It started with a phone call from a Polish journalist, an author and former editor in chief of the largest Polish newspaper in Chicago. She was searching for a photographic voice for her book about the remains of the iconic places that shaped the history of Chicago’s Polonia.

As much as I was reluctant to take on this collaboration, I began to realize that this was an important moment in time to be captured; Polonia as it exists today, in its final stage, only to eventually take its last breath and give way to whatever will be its new incarnation. 

The term Polonia pertains to Poles living abroad, but I would argue it describes a certain attitude. One riddled with anxiety to belong and the contradictory need to stay separated, all interwoven with a theoretical sense of patriotism and an almost monarchic attitude towards the Catholic Church. 

I knew before I started, that “this iconic” wasn’t going to be like Grand Central iconic. These humble places, restaurants, theaters and churches, gained their immortality solely through the voices of their “inhabitants” who have now largely migrated to more affluent suburbs, while their owners remain, as if welded into the walls. I encountered a sense of ghosts, a world that lives within its own strange universe, behind closed doors, thriving only in the collective consciousness of the transitioning Polonia.

This sensation of the intangible found its way into each photo I selected to depict my personal journey, layering it with hidden metaphors, which make the concept of Polonia a highly polarizing subject to my generation. As I started questioning my own sense of belonging I have cautiously included my own, concealed, self portrait. I, like many of my generation, seem to be unclear as to our sense of identity within the world. 

The further I dug, the deeper I sank into the bowels of old buildings and dark basements, where the separation from reality became the real and only existence. Behind closed doors, this is Poland.