I Can’t get Through the Chaos
Michal Adamski
Self Published
Polish
Hardcover
48 pages
136×196 mm
2015
ISBN: 978-8-39412-980-4
One year,
one place
two deaths.
“I cannot get through the chaos” is a record of struggling with the death of the author’s parents. They both passed away in the same year, in the same hospital, after several months spent in bed. Michal Adamski accompanied them to the last breath. Photos arose in the intervals regard between care and fragments of conversations. It’s hard to talk, when you know that someone is going to die, and that is why photography has become his shield that allows him to survive this difficult time. Calm which become after the last farewell is just apparent. You can finally collect your thoughts and enter into an empty family home. Silence and emptiness of that place, which recently was vibrant with life, strike you.
“It was a tough year for me. I’ve watched my parents dying slowly. Despite their advanced age I have not been prepared for death. It was hard to pull myself together after I’ve learned that the dad’s surgery did not succeed and he is in a coma. When he woke up I had to mobilise myself to take care of him, knowing that the fight will not be easy and the end not predictable. It was not easy for me to enter an empty house, where I was struck by the overwhelming silence and the ordinary things that looked like parents left it and were out only for a while. I’ve photographed my mother before she went to the hospital, but I realised how important it is just when she was leaving. I’ve needed these photographs, not to go crazy, and to be able to collect my thoughts for a while. I wanted to embrace these photographs into an album, to be able to end this phase of life, and the work with the book allowed me to get used to the death of my parents.”
Michal Adamski was born in 1976 in Poznan, Poland. He is self-taught photographer and works as a freelancer. Member of Association of Polish Art Photographers. Member of UN-POSED collective, Promachine collective. Winner of press competitions. Currently involved in social matters focusing on man and his life in the contemporary world. Scholarship holder of Marshal of the Wielkopolska region.
www.michaladamski.com.pl
Michał Adamski: I can’t get through the chaos from Marcin Grabowiecki on Vimeo.
