Richard Tuschman

“Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz” is a novella told in staged photographs. It portrays an episode in the life of a fictional Jewish family living in Krakow, Poland in the year 1930. Dreamlike and poetic in style, “Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz” tells a tale primarily of loss. Death, the fraying of family bonds, and feelings of grief haunt many of the images, but these are also punctuated by moments of love, longing, and tenderness. The setting itself is a metaphor for loss and decay. As described in 1935 by the Jewish historian, Meir Balaban, by then the Jews remaining in the “once vibrant” neighborhood of Kazimierz were “only the poor and the ultra-conservative.” And while the series takes place some years before the death camps of the Holocaust, a growing darkness is apparent, along with the underlying awareness that most likely and tragically, the fates of all of the characters are doomed by history. The images in “Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz” were created by digitally marrying handmade dollhouse-size dioramas with live models. This way of working affords me control over the elements of set design, lighting, and composition. These elements are significantly inspired by theatre and cinema, as well as by painters like Vermeer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and de Chirico. While I strive to make the miniature sets as convincing as possible, they deviate just enough from reality to enhance the theatrical, slightly surreal mood. All of the images in “Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz” are linked to a larger narrative arc. While I have a particular sequence of events in my own mind, I like to think of this story as open-ended, perhaps as movie stills from an unseen motion picture. Thus, each viewer is left to ponder and interpret each image, to fill in the gaps between the images, or to rearrange their chronological sequence. It is my hope that in this way, the pictures in “Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz” reflect the fleeting, fluid nature of both memory, and of dreams.