The Boy in the Photograph

The Photograph

 

The boys outside my grandmother Irka’s house in Wyryki, summer 1993.

 

In the summer of 1993, when I was ten, I took a photograph outside my grandmother Irka’s house in Wyryki, the village in eastern Poland where I grew up. My cousins Radek, Hubert and Darek, and my nine-year-old brother Michał had stopped playing football to pose for me.

My brother’s first camera used rolls of film with about thirty-six exposures, and I couldn’t see what I had captured until the film was developed. I followed everyone around like a little paparazzi, trying to decide which moments were worth keeping.

 

My cousins playing football in Wyryki. Radek is lying in the grass in the background. 

Radek was seventeen, and to me he seemed almost grown-up—strong and independent. He and his older brother had already left Wyryki for boarding school in Gdynia, which felt so far away to me then. Later, he served in the navy and became a diver and underwater welder. 

His father was a welder too. I was always struck by how Radek carried something familiar from home into such a different environment. He had followed the same trade, but quite literally taken it somewhere deeper.  

 

With Radek, his younger sister and my cousin Hubert in Wyryki, summer 1993.

 

At my grandmother Irka’s house in Wyryki, July 1993. I am fourth from the left, with my siblings and cousins. Beyond the road is the open ground where we played, with the small grove visible in the distance.

 

The Radek I knew was cheerful and easy to talk to. When I returned to the photograph nearly thirty years later, it brought back that summer at my grandmother’s: the football, the warmth, all of us together for a while. But I no longer saw Radek as the almost-adult I had admired at ten. I saw a boy on the edge of adulthood, with no way of knowing what lay ahead.

I kept looking at his crossed arms, raised shoulder, and tilted head. There was something feisty about his pose, but something guarded too. Perhaps he was simply squinting into the summer light. Even so, the possibility of vulnerability beneath the confidence moved me. I wanted to draw him, to work with the photograph and see what else I might find there.

 

What Drew Me In

 

Screenprint experiment on linen, developed from the photograph of Radek, 2020.

 

By then, I was studying at Glasgow School of Art and had spent several years exploring the human figure. Earlier projects had drawn me towards questions of identity, the relationship between self and others, and, for a time, masculinity. In my final year, I became more interested in how a figure might suggest an inner or spiritual state without trying to illustrate it directly.

I am most drawn to figures who seem to hold more than one feeling at once, or who leave me with mixed impressions. I saw that possibility in Radek’s photograph.

Jeff Buckley’s music became a companion to the work because I heard a similar contrast in him: delicacy alongside force. His voice struck me: soft and fragile one moment, suddenly forceful and wild the next. I also liked the passion with which he spoke about expression, intuition, and spirituality. He didn’t treat sensitivity as weakness, or spirituality as something separate from ordinary life.

 

Taking the Image Apart

 

Exploring positive and negative forms through Radek’s silhouette, 2020–21.

 

Studio research, notes and print experiments based on Radek’s image, 2020–21.

 

I began with printmaking because it let me make several versions of the photograph and place them side by side. I took Radek out of the group, then worked with his image through photo-etching and screenprinting. I changed the colours, reversed positive and negative forms, and gradually reduced the figure to a silhouette. In one print his body was a solid shape; in another it was a space surrounded by ink. Seeing those versions together helped me notice how much his posture carried even when his face and clothing were barely there.

I looked at Gary Hume and David Noonan while making the prints. Their use of simplified figures encouraged me to focus on shape and surface, rather than adding detail to explain what I saw.

Only after I had isolated Radek did I notice what else I had removed. He had been standing with three other boys, pausing in the middle of a game. Alone on the page, his pose felt different. I had made that change to concentrate on the figure, but it also changed the situation in which I saw him.

Around this time, a tutor suggested Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I was working from a photograph and making multiple prints, so his writing about reproduction was relevant. What stayed with me was his idea of aura. I had often found myself drawn to someone at the edge of an old photograph, looking past the main subject towards a face or gaze that caught my attention. Now I was placing Radek at the centre and altering his image repeatedly. Benjamin made me think about what might be lost as I reproduced and altered the photograph. Yet the further the prints moved from the original image, the more closely I found myself looking at Radek.

 

From Print to Paint

 

An early stage of Humble, 2021.

 

I made the prints in the workshops at GSA, where I was still learning printmaking. When the pandemic closed them, we were given screens and some equipment to take home. I turned a room in our house into a studio. My daughter’s school had closed too, and much of each day was taken up with homeschooling.

I found myself moving towards painting, something I had done since childhood. But I didn’t leave the prints behind. In Humble, Radek remained alone, without the other boys or the landscape. I worked with brushes, glazes, and a printmaking roller, leaving some of its flat marks visible on the canvas. At first, he was barely distinguishable from the dark ground. I brought him forward gradually, without filling in everything I had removed from the photograph.

I had been looking at Yuma Tomiyasu’s paintings made from old photographs. I liked her dark backgrounds and the thin layers and flat areas of colour through which her figures emerged. Radek was more clearly defined than the figures in her work, but I tried not to overwork him. I wanted some of the surface to remain quiet and spare.

I painted much of the background in Payne’s Grey. It reminded me of a school blackboard and of being called to the front of the classroom. Even when I knew the answer, I hated standing there under everyone’s gaze. As I painted Radek facing out from the dark, that old discomfort came back to me. The ochres, oranges, and warm flesh tones came from a different kind of memory: his hair could look brown in winter and almost reddish in summer. I was less interested in photographic likeness than in the impression Radek had left in my memory.

My thinking about the solitary figure also took me back to Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Looking at the two paintings now, I see an interesting reversal. Friedrich's wanderer turns his back to us and faces an immense landscape. I had removed the landscape from mine. Radek faced out of the darkness, and anyone looking at Humble would have to meet his gaze.

 

Rebel and Humble

 

Humble, 2021. Oil on canvas, 120 × 80 cm.

 

For a while, I called the work Boy, though Rebel appeared in my notebook and on the project folder. There was something defiant in Radek's posture, and I associated it with the kind of rebellion that often belongs to being young.

As I worked on the painting, I thought about Antoni Libera's Madame, a novel I had read several times. I loved its humour and rhythm, but also its young main character's resistance to the adults around him who seemed convinced that the most interesting times belonged to their own generation. He wants his own experiences to matter. 

There is something romantic about that kind of youthful rebellion. So much is happening for the first time that both happiness and disappointment can feel enormous. I have never wished to return to adolescence, but while painting this boy, I found myself thinking about its intensity.

Then, as I worked at home, I heard St Francis mentioned in a programme filmed in Assisi. He was remembered for humility and simplicity, yet he had also rejected the life expected of him. I began to wonder whether rebellion and humility were necessarily opposites: whether refusing what others expect of us might sometimes sit alongside questioning our own certainty about who we are.

I didn't need the contradiction to resolve itself. It was precisely the tension between the two words that interested me.

Eventually the painting became Humble. 

 

When the Painting Left the Studio

 

The Alternative Degree Show Festival, Glasgow, July 2021.

 

Humble at the Alternative Degree Show Festival, Glasgow, 2021.

 

I finished Humble towards the end of my undergraduate degree. The pandemic meant that the Degree Show we had expected could not take place in its usual form. GSA presented a digital Graduate Showcase instead. After making the painting to be seen on a canvas, it felt strange to reach the end of my studies through a screen.

More than 180 graduating Fine Art students organised the Alternative Degree Show Festival across several locations in Glasgow, and I showed Humble there. Until then, I had seen Radek mostly in the room where I painted him. Now people who knew nothing about that summer in Wyryki could stand in front of him.

I noticed some men crossing their arms as they looked at the painting, or shifting into a posture like his. Others told me whom “the boy” reminded them of. To them, he could be someone from their own lives. To me, he was still Radek, my cousin who had looked towards my camera in 1993.

I had worried that a subject so close to my family might matter only to me. Hearing people speak about the painting eased that doubt. They did not need to know Radek’s story to find something familiar in his image.

 

What Remained

 

Breaking down earlier Rebel prints to make handmade paper, 2022.

 

The painting left my studio, but I still had the prints and experiments I had made from Radek’s image.

During my MLitt in Print Media at GSA, I tore up some of the Rebel and Diver prints, soaked and pulped them, and made the fibres into new sheets of paper. Destroying the images was difficult. Radek’s figure was no longer visible, but the ink and paper remained in the work itself. What I made from those sheets belongs to another story.

When I took that photograph, I was trying to keep a moment from a summer at my grandmother’s house. I could not have imagined how often I would return to it, or how many different forms Radek’s image would take. I still remember the four boys standing together in the sun. What I made years later began when I looked again at the one I thought I already knew.