Barnaby Nutt, ed – ‘No Constructive Conclusions’

‘No Constructive Conclusions’ collects work shot around Katowice, Poland, and the Silesian Metropolis by Wojtek Mszyca, Pavel Pětroš, and Ian Barnaby Nutt. After meeting on Flickr, Wojtek invited the others to visit him in Poland  and shoot around his hometown. Pavel and Barnaby went at different times, and later, the three put their photographs together and exhibited the project at venues in Poland and the Czech Republic in 2017. Barnaby produced this limited zine to advertise the exhibition, and as a keepsake, and I was lucky enough to wind up with a copy. Win!

Barnaby put ‘No Constructive Conclusions’ together and wrote up a  nice post about it. Sets of pictures by the three photographers are separated by exhibition announcements from the three galleries: Galeria AMI, KATO, and Kultura FM. I think Pavel leads off, Wojtek leads things off with a series of urban/industrial landscapes in mix of black & white and color; Wojtek Pavel comes next, with color street-type photos of run down neighborhoods; and Barnaby’s shots of the communist block type architecture and monuments, in muted color, brings the brief zine to a close.

Taken together, the whole set gives a nice overview of the beauty, life, and change going on in Poland in the early twenty-first century. It makes me want to get out and walk more, explore the place I live more than I do. Sure, we don’t have that great 1970s Communist heyday architecture or monuments to the heroes of the commune or whatever, but we have some nice apartment complexes in various states of disrepair and loads of shopping malls and parking lots, and all that is important to document and explore: it won’t always be around, at least not like the negatives will.

Concept
Content
Design

Overall, I’d give it 4.3 stars. It’s really a shame it’s not more widely available.

Maybe if you reach out to Barnaby on his website or Twitter, maybe he’ll put out a second, larger edition or something. And if you know of a place that might be willing to exhibit the work (especially in the UK, but anywhere, really), I bet they’d love to get the work in front of more eyeballs.