Published in the Observer in July 2007, this is a review of the exhibition Theatres of War, curated by Mark Power at the Oskar Schindler factory in Krakow, Poland, part of the main programme of Krakow Photomonth 2007.

On a pot-holed track straggling through the rusty industrial fringes of Krakow, Oskar Schindler’s factory looks like a down-at-heel, dishonoured shrine. The paint has peeled from its Art Deco facade, and its bristling metal gate, through which Liam Neeson’s limo sleekly swept in ‘Schindler’s List’, is scratched and dented. Its streamlined curves, lucid skylights and bricks of shining cubic glass forlornly recall the idealism of the 1930s: architecture then was supposed to redeem mankind, constructing monuments to the white transparency of what Man Ray called ‘the age of light’. But even for the Jewish workers Schindler protected, the factory, as Thomas Keneally puts it in his novel ‘Schindler’s Ark’, was only a ‘relative paradise’. After their shifts, Schindler’s unpaid drudges returned to a concentration camp down the road, where they slept in barracks behind an electrified fence.

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At first glance it is a simple picture. A number of paths, nestling between two modest hills, disappear into the far distance. The light is flat and uninteresting, the sky blank.

The title chosen for this arresting body of work is as taut, condensed and suggestive as the images themselves.  In post-Kleinian psychoanalytic thought, specifically that of Wilfred Bion, PS<->D denotes the constantly operating forward thrust and regressive pull of two very distinctive states of mind, or attitudes to life and to the world – what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions.  The former, more primitive, state is characterised by extreme defences against the pain of emotional experience; the latter by the capacity to suffer, in the sense of being able to undergo, that experience – to bear disillusionment, imperfection, guilt, separation and lost ideals in the, perhaps only momentary, achievement of a forever unquiet mind.