Photographer Alicja Dobrucka documents tragedy and Polish identity in new book

Alicja Dobrucka’s deeply personal and emotive photographic series I Like You I Like You A Lot is to be published by new London imprint Kali. The project began in 2008, when Polish-born Alicja discovered her 13-year-old brother Maks had tragically drowned. On her visits home, the photographer documented the sequence of events in the aftermath and the family’s grief, saying she used her camera as a “protecting shield” from the brutal reality of a helpless situation.

Later, the project evolved to continue Maks’ life, in a way, as she began investigating the items that had been important him and spending time with his friends, “to imagine the life that her brother might still be living,” the publisher says. “He and his friends, inspired by the ideal of the ‘hero’ soldier propagated through American cinema, formed a small, close group who dressed in the uniforms of U.S. soldiers and played in the mountains and forest around their town.

“For Alicja, noting that Communism officially ended in Poland in 1990, when the country opened its borders to a flood of Western products, arts, ideas and ideals, she identifies these boys as the first generation to grow up under that new culture. In thrall to these new archetypes, this pervasive culture has become the dominant one. In some respects then, for Dobrucka to document the loss of her brother through the continuing lives of his friends was also to document a certain loss of Polish identity.”

Kali also comments that the series “does not shy away from the subject of death, and yet is not morbid”. Instead, the photographs paint an honest and reflective portrait of Alicja’s experience. She has received the Deutsche Bank Fine Art Photography Award, and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, as well as exhibiting at the ICA and Photographers’ Gallery in London and Zachety Project Space in Warsaw.

Kali is raising funds for the publication via Kickstarter here.