Janusz was my uncle. He lived together with his parents in a suburb of Wroclaw.
He drank and smoked and sometimes he did paintings and sculptures. He was free, so much free that he got lost. This is my short story about him in the few visits I made between 1994 and 2016.
Janusz had a problem of addiction to alcohol (to name it sweet). His odd way of living attracted me in some ways. When he was not drunk he made beautiful paintings, small sculptures and wooden objects of great craft. Most of the time, he was used to walk around the house, swearing, talking and laughing alone, smoking one cigarette after another and drinking beer or wine or whatever. My grandmother, Helena, took care of him the best she could. She was his mother and it shouldn’t be easy to be stretched between the love for his son and the need to make something to heal him forcedly. At the end, the first prevailed and she has sacrificed her whole life around him.
When I started to be interested in photography, as a teenager, it was natural to photograph during my short visits to Poland. That was the place of adventures: a two days travel on a train passing three national borders, a whole different world (the Berlin wall fell few time before and the east was still east for few more years), an unfamiliar neighborhood, a strange language. My uncle became one of my subjects and it was like a play between us to take pictures of him.
At one of my last visits, in 1999, I went to my grandmother’s house without a notice, hoping to surprise her. Then, the surprise was on me: the beautiful house I remembered as a child and the life I left there had all changed. The corner of my uncle’s bedroom was filled with a blanket, a sheet and few pillows. There was no bed in the room. My grandfather left the house, living Helena alone with Janusz. Something changed forever. Janusz and Helena tied themselves together so tight that nothing could change or enter their life.
In January 2015 I met the photographer Michael Ackerman during a workshop in Milan. He looked at the different photographs I brought with me and he stopped at the few about Janusz, almost ignoring the others. He said: «you should focus on these, go to Poland, go finish this work». In the last day he gave me a zloty coin, saying: «you will return it to me when you will go there and we meet». Almost two years later I went to Poland to meet Janusz again after a very long time. He lived in a different house together with a woman. I asked to take some photographs and he allowed me (as he always did). I finished my work on him. In December 2021 I met Michael during a showcase, I gave him back the zloty coin. Janusz died in 2019.
Many times, when I looked at the photographs of Janusz, Helena and Poland I would like to put this story in the real world, to possibly make a book of that. I didn’t find a particular reason if not a personal need of doing it. In February 2024 I met by chance Gabriele Lopez, a photographer with a very deep passion who also run a self-publishing house under the name of “Broken Poems”. I talked to him about my work on Janusz and one year later it came to life.
This book is to my uncle Janusz and to my grandmother Helena
