TO BECOME A SOLDIER (Poland, 1970-1979)
In the 1970s Andrzej Baturo worked as a photojournalist for the Polish media. For those who were sensitive to what they were seeing, his photo stories became reports on the inhumanity of the communist system. His To Become a Soldier is an example. In it one can see how recruits to the Polish army were deprived of their basic human dignity. Baturo was able to do the photographs under the pretence of working on a different subject. In the 1970s he sought to publish the series in an independent Polish magazine. Only the photograph in which a group of soldiers stand rigidly at attention in a line made it past the censors. In order to subtly indicate to the readers that the rest of the series was rejected, the editors provided the sole photograph published with the headline ‘A Report on the Army’. Exhibiting the photographs was unthinkable.
