“Warszawa Centralna” is a hand made accordion booklet with 55 silver prints dry mounted on it’s pages. The prints size is about 17×12 cm, I made them in traditional darkroom on a high contrast paper – so all the folded booklet is small and portable, but it can be displayed open and is more than 6 mt. long. This one, about the area around Central Train Station in Warsaw, Poland, is the first volume of a series I am planning for all the main districts of the city.
The accordion structure allows the watcher to change and personalize the sequence of the pictures, and find his own personal narrative and aesthetic rhythm.
The pictures were shot in winter 2014, only in the area around the Central Station, with a basic equipment (a 35 mm slr camera and a 35 mm lens only) and were shot on film, to have as less as possible infrastructures when I met my subjects.
I used the station as a scenographic element and focused on those people who inhabits it.
The train stations are in general a place for fast transit of people, but for beggars, homeless people, buskers and alcoholics (those who permanently live there) is the place where they can beg to survive or to make a living. I organized the sequence around the portraits of some of these inhabitants and the details of their own lives, like the few coins the were able to collect, the cigarette butts they hunt around, and also some edible urban mushrooms that they collect in the bushes around the station.
To respect the subject of my research, and looking for a general sense of fluidity, in this booklet I decided to include photographic repetitions and errors, and to adopt a rough high contrast style of photography, with no post production at all, except the choice of contrast for the film and the paper in the darkroom.
These are scans from the original accordion booklet.