Zula Rabikowska and Harriet Fairbairn: Identity and Community

Zula Rabikowska and Harriet Fairbairn both photograph identity as something inherited rather than chosen: one through the generation of women and non-binary people born after the Iron Curtain came down, the other through Italian food and what it says about who counts as Italian. They were billed together for a London talk on 14 January 2020.

Zula Rabikowska

Rabikowska was born in Poland and is based in London. A grant listing by Queer Art describes her as a Polish queer photographer and visual artist based in London whose work addresses migration, gender and LGBTQI+ communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Her own experience of migration runs through the work, which keeps returning to national identity, displacement and belonging.

Nothing but a Curtain

Her best documented project is Nothing but a Curtain, made in 2021. The figures come from Photomonitor's portfolio feature, published in October 2023: 7,325 km travelled in 100 days, using public transport only, across 20 cities in ten countries, namely Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. She photographed and interviewed 104 people, all of them born in or after 1989. The camera was a Kiev 80, a medium-format analogue body made in 1978 at a military factory in Kiev, whose metal shutter leaves a visible band across the frame. Photomonitor lists the funders as Getty Images, the Mead Fellowship and the Kuala Lumpur Project Awards.

The work was shown at Four Corners Gallery in London from 10 to 14 October 2023, and as a multimedia exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University. A book launch for Nothing but a Curtain was held at The Photographers' Gallery bookshop in London. A profile published by Watermans notes that she teaches at Kingston University and co-founded the collective Rethinking Eastern Europe.

One point of language is the project's own argument: the collective term "Eastern Europe" flattens ten different countries, several of which would rather be described as Central European. The work replaces a regional stereotype with 104 individual accounts, which is why the number of interviews matters as much as the number of pictures.

Harriet Fairbairn

Fairbairn is a photographic artist based in London, working on themes of culture, politics and policy. The work she presented explored Italian cultural identity through food, which is a cultural question and a political one at the same time: the rise of the far right in Italy gave the argument about who counts as Italian a much sharper edge.

That project is online under the name Harriet Zawedde, at harrietzawedde.com, as Nightshade, Italian Recipes. The about page there lists the same three degrees, in social policy at York, international public policy at UCL, and photojournalism and documentary photography at LCC, and describes a British editorial and documentary photographer in London working observationally and research-led across portraiture, documentary and editorial commissions.

Nightshade, Italian Recipes uses the tomato as its device. The tomato is native to the Americas, it belongs to the nightshade family, and it arrived in Italy as an import before becoming the single most identifiable element of Italian cooking. The work follows that history through portraiture, botanical imagery and microscopy, and sets it against migration, intolerance and eventual acceptance. A second project on the site, No Man is an Island, is listed as an in-progress exploration of the island of Britain.

Food, borders and the documentary photograph

Both projects belong to a recognisable approach: take a national identity that presents itself as ancient and self-evident, then find the object that proves it was assembled. For Rabikowska the object is a Soviet-era camera whose shutter physically draws a curtain across every frame. For Fairbairn it is a fruit from Peru. In each case the photographic decision carries the argument, rather than a caption carrying it.

This way of working also changes how the pictures get funded and shown. Neither project is a news assignment, and both reach audiences through exhibitions and books rather than publication. The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, which fund UK-based artists between one and ten years into their practice with no educational requirement and no fee to apply, are an example of the infrastructure such work depends on.

More photographers working on identity and community are listed on the speakers index, and the archive of talk pages is at events. Related pages here include Monica Alcazar-Duarte and Pierre Alozie, and Roland Ramanan and Mark Phillips on long-term community projects. For how London talks of this kind were organised, see photography talks in London.