Early spring sun, long shadows and busy streets — perfect conditions to try a new lens.
I’d driven up to Warsaw for gigs on consecutive nights: Godspeed You! Black Emperor at Klub Progresja, followed by Rival Consoles at Niebo the next night. I arrived on Thursday and wandered through the sunshine with a new lens for the Leica — a TTArtisans 28mm f/5.6.
My favourite focal length sits somewhere between 28 and 35mm, depending on the camera and what I’m shooting. In a busy city, wider tends to work better. I was keen to try 28mm on the Leica after enjoying it so much on my old Ricoh GRIII — the one I drowned a few years ago.
Twenty-eight millimetres suited the Ricoh because I rarely looked at the screen. I’d just have a rough idea of the field of view and rely on snap focus and face recognition. At that focal length, with reasonable light, pretty much everything is in focus anyway.
As a little challenge, I spent a while trying to take ‘street’ pictures with a self-imposed rule that the magnificent Pałac Nauki i Kultury had to be in the frame…
So I was curious whether the same focal length on a rangefinder — with no live view — would feel similar. It does. I ended up shooting a lot without looking through the viewfinder at all, enjoying the slightly ridiculous idea of having such an expensive point-and-shoot.
The low sun and busy streets were rendered beautifully by the lens. It’s cheap but feels very solid (machined and plated brass) and vignettes quite a bit, but stopped down to f/8–f/11 it’s impressively sharp. It’s tiny too.
I’ve owned several Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums since release but never listened to them that often. Their dense sound, long tracks and political, conceptual albums mean they’ve never exactly been easy listening.
I mainly bought the ticket because I wanted to see Rival Consoles and thought I’d make the three-hour drive worthwhile by adding another night and another show. I’m very glad I did. Their reputation as a phenomenal live act is completely deserved.
GY!BE’s music often builds slowly from ambient drone to huge crescendos. With three guitars, two bassists, two drummers and a violin, there’s immense detail in the sound — especially when the venue’s system and mixing are as good as they were here. Despite the cacophonous volume, every instrument remained clear.
The sound is complex, dense and powerful, yet somehow manages to feel at the same time both improvised and incredibly tight.
A ninth member of the group “plays” a bank of 16mm film projectors, looping grainy images of highways, industrial decay and abstract shapes. The repetition works perfectly. The musicians themselves are mostly static — the guitarists seated throughout — so the visuals take on extra weight, becoming another instrument in the performance.
Eight tracks stretched to well over 100 minutes. Perfection.
Of the many hundreds of gigs I’ve seen, this went straight into the top tier. In fact, it was so good that I immediately bought a ticket for another Polish show a couple of nights later — 400km away.
The next day I walked over to Praga, on the east bank of the Vistula River.
Praga escaped much of the destruction of the Second World War, so many of its late-19th and early-20th-century brick tenements survived. For decades the area had a reputation for poverty, crime and neglected buildings.
That’s changed dramatically in recent years. Although it missed out on Warsaw’s grand post-war rebuilding, the last 15–20 years have brought major regeneration. Old buildings have been restored or replaced, streets block paved and cycle lanes added. There’s an arty, bohemian feel.
Still, a few pockets remain that feel closer to how I remember earlier visits, and I wanted to find one or two of the old courtyards with their traditional shrines.
I headed for one on Brzeska Street and stepped inside for a look. Places like this can feel slightly intimidating if you don’t speak the language very well and you’re carrying a fancy camera.
The courtyard was quiet — peeling plaster, bigoted graffiti, scattered junk, a couple of abandoned caravans resting crookedly on their axles. I raised the camera to frame this shot…
At that exact moment a guy stepped out of one of the caravans and looked straight at me.
Needless to say, rather than saying ‘hello’ or attempting conversation, I legged it!
The Rival Consoles show that night was good, but after the previous evening it was always going to struggle to compete.
I come from the same city as Ryan Lee West and have seen him several times in very different venues. Once upstairs at the Firebug pub in Leicester, where he played to about a dozen people despite already being fairly well known. I apologised afterwards on behalf of the city and begged him not to give up on playing there.
I’m not sure he ever went back.
Another time I saw him headline an Erased Tapes showcase at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. And now here he was again, this time in a Warsaw dance club next to one of Poland’s best craft beer spots, PINTA.
His set was well paced and went down brilliantly with a busy Friday night crowd — a good end to the trip, even if the previous night had already set an almost impossible benchmark.
Barnaby Nutt 