THE Q&A: DAVID HLYNSKY, PHOTOGRAPHER

1989 marked the end of the cold war, and much attention has been paid to the 20th anniversary of velvet revolutions and walls coming down. But what about the days and lives spent behind that wall?

In the mid- to late-1980s David Hlynsky ended up travelling to the eastern bloc. What began as a brief jaunt to publicise an exhibition of his photographs ended up becoming a longstanding project–one that resulted in thousands of photos. In years spent chronicling the mundanities of daily life under communism, Hlynsky was most mesmerised by the shop windows, which offered the greatest contrast between east and west, capitalist and communist. Here were spare displays, drab colours and a disregard for acquisitiveness unlike anything he had seen before.

In recent years Hlynsky’s images have been exhibited in art galleries in Prague and Berlin. Some reacted with nostalgia or a renewed sense of relief at the end of that era. Younger viewers saw mainly communist kitsch, an impossibly quaint sense of the recent past, so remote as to seem almost imaginary. Many have seen and responded to Hlynsky’s shop-window photos via his website. This is how I came to know of them, after a music blog linked to his arresting photograph of a restaurant window in Yugoslavia, in which a small set table for two sits patiently beneath streamlined decals of a knife, fork and plate.

The images yield a quizzical coded signage. A photo of a Moscow post office features an illustrated poster of a steam engine, a modern train, a clipper ship and a modern ocean liner. Other images are achingly direct, such as an illuminated sign of a T-shirt for a child's clothing store, glowing wanly against an evening sky.

Hlynsky's photographs capture the way the ordinary details of our surroundings, those we rarely notice, can contain so much life in them. Over the phone, he spoke about his travels and his photographs, about the power of the banal and the limits of cultural memory.

More Intelligent Life: So how did you end up spending all this time in the eastern bloc during the 1980s?

David Hlynsky: I grew up during the cold war in the ‘50s and ‘60s. My ancestors were all from Eastern Europe but they all came at the turn of the last century. During the cold war there were these stereotypes about Russians and Poles and anybody from the East. My grandmother didn’t have much of a command of the language so I learned about the old country, as she called it, in very vague terms. And it seemed to me that it was just very backward and rural. Anyway, in 1985 I had an exhibition in Toronto and a young Polish curator asked me if I would like to show it in Krakow. I had no idea that Krakow was the city that it is. I took the opportunity to jump on a plane and go over there to represent the work, and it turns out that Krakow is where Copernicus taught at the oldest university in Europe. I travelled to Prague at the same time, and Prague just knocked me out, architecturally. I took a Hasselblad with me thinking I was going to take pictures of other artists there, and it just turned up that I ended up shooting on the streets. Then when I came back to Toronto I looked at the images and I started noticing store windows in the background. I decided that I would make another trip there and get some more store windows. And then I got the bug.

MIL: Where else did you go?

DH: I made a trip to Berlin and went into the East, just for a short trip. I made special trips to Budapest, and one time to Belgrade and across Bulgaria to the Black Sea, a kind of solo driving trip. I was most interested in being quiet and documenting what I saw, so it was fine not to be able to talk to people. Crossing borders was always an adventure. Each one posed different problems, [but] they were never insurmountable. I was entertained by them. I then went to Cuba and to communist Europe twice more, and to Moscow before it all fell, all the while carrying this camera, and by then I had developed a kind of shooting methodology, and I was concentrating more on the store window. I have about 8,000 images, mostly of street scenes and people, but the store windows seem to be the ones that are the most unique.

MIL: You had been shooting mainly portraits prior to this, so why the shift to street photography?

DH: I went to Ohio State in the mid-‘60s during the anti-war movement and I was photographing there after the race riots in Cleveland. So between civil rights, the anti-war movement, and the women's movement I sort of honed my craft with a lot of left-leaning photojournalists. When I went to Toronto in 1970 I got involved in the literary and art scene there so I kind of moved away from street photography toward more art-based photography.

MIL: You have said you purposely avoided the “dramatic and newsworthy.” Why?

DH: Over the course of my career I’ve grown to understand that photography has the kind of unique ability to capture banality. You can also capture dramatic things, but I find that the banal is much more interesting and informative. So if you take a picture of somebody walking down the street in communist Europe it’s interesting to see the person but it’s even more interesting to see that their shoelaces are untied. All my photographic practice I’ve tried to accentuate that banal aspect.

MIL: So shop windows struck you as representing this banality?

DH: Yes, the shop windows were this thing that I saw all over the landscape, and the more I looked at them the more interesting they got. Not just from a historical view, which I couldn’t have known then, but also from a design sense, a social science point of view because these windows didn’t represent all the things that we consumed in the West. The material culture was entirely different. The display of products was different. The lack of advertising was a significant change from what I’d grown up with, and I began to see these things as one really interesting representation of the difference between East and West.

It’s one thing to have a photo of a woman with chubby cheeks and a babushka, and it’s another thing to see what she buys, and that became a real focus for me. Now bear in mind that we were looking at dramatic pictures in the West of a bread line or people struggling, and because those were so pervasive you began to think that was what life was really about. And once I got there I realised that was just one aspect and not even a large aspect. I saw lines for cigarettes and some things. The shops had many fewer goods, at less quality and variety, but they had things for people to buy. It was not a struggle to get a meal or buy a shirt.

MIL: Have you been back since the fall of communism?

DH: I went back a number of times, to Poland and the Czech republic in 1991. I took many photos but haven’t printed a single one. Since then I’ve been back to Prague three more times, mostly in the context of exhibiting this work. I’ve had a couple million hits on my website, most of them from the former eastern bloc. There's been a full generation since the wall came down. Anyone who’s 27 or younger sees these pictures as really funny, kind of quaint, and silly. Anyone who’s older than that sees them as a representation of a harder time, but [also] just a different time, and they’re nostalgic for some of that difference, the quietness of their lives and the cityscape.

Now things are overrun with fast food and sports bars. Some people are nostalgic for a simpler life in general, when they didn’t have to hustle so much. When I would visit my friends in Poland we would have these gatherings that would go on for hours, with great food and drink, singing and playing music, talk about books. After the change [this friend] moved into a condo with a Jacuzzi, but he was working 12 to 15 hours a day, he had barely any time to talk. So that shift from a slowed down pace during the communist era to a very aggressive pace in the capitalist era has been very impactful to people.

MIL: Why haven't you chosen to keep documenting the changes that have taken place?

DH: If I photograph a McDonald’s in Moscow, it will not only look very much like one anywhere else, but people won’t be surprised by it. We definitely have lost something. I don’t know if one would have wanted to live there under that system, but it’s lost. Wenceslas Square in Prague was always fairly dark at night and at the tops of all the buildings were neon signs that represented state industry on the tops of these elegant old buildings. Now you go to that same strip and it’s pizza joint, strip club, sports bar, people selling liquor in the street, discos, casinos, jammed with people and buzzing with lights. Is that good or bad? I don’t want to make that judgment, but something has changed, and changed kind of radically.

MIL: So are you concerned that the world you documented will disappear from the cultural memory?

DH: I’m not sure if it’s fading from memory. That will take another few generations. I hear word that East Berliners and West Berliners are still two distinct societies. Prosperity is all over the city but there are subtle cultural differences, and they experience it more than is evident to us. It will take a long time for this to vanish entirely. I have always noticed that these people are completely like us, [with] the same needs and curiosities that we have. It wasn’t that they were all brain-dead from indoctrination. There was amazing art happening there under those systems, incredibly subtle and engaged with political struggle. Lots of things that never got a chance to enter the Western mindset. So then when the walls came down I saw all this rewriting of history, and it surprised me. Suddenly the people who were our sworn enemies–overnight those differences don’t mean anything anymore. And it was an interesting problem for the US to deal with. How do you function without an enemy?

MIL: What then is the legacy of communism, or of its disappearance?

DH: What’s been lost is philosophical diversity. That doesn’t mean I’m endorsing communist philosophy, but when you clip off one end of the spectrum it becomes inherently more conservative, no matter which end gets clipped off. There’s also a loss of difference which is essential for comparison. And when I walk through those countries now I also get a sense that the colours have all changed. Gone are the soft earth-tone colours of bare buildings. They've been upstaged by the loud, primary colours of advertising.