The Photobook Show
Laughing through Tears: Photography in the Age of “Too Late” Capitalism
episode 27
We’re very happy to welcome photographer Aga Łuczakowska to The Photobook Show and speak with her about her new book Râsu’-plânsu’ — which roughly translates as “laughing through tears.” Aga (based in Katowice, Poland) lived and worked in Bucharest, Romania, where over several years she photographed the tiny “interventions” that people there made as small acts of resistance against the uniformity of the decaying communist-era housing they lived in. We’ll also talk with Aga about her fascinating project “Interventions” that approachs this book as a space for intervention and personal expression, as well as a starting point to engage in dialogue with her readers.
We’ll open this episode with a short presentation of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism and how this concept of immediacy helps us understand why the two big books we talked about in our last two sessions are so massive and why Aga’s “Interventions” work like throwing a wrench into the photographic machinery of the Big Book.
Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more (including presenting The Photobook Show) for StrudelmediaLive.
