Polish photographer Łukasz Rusznica has collaborated with German designer Thomas Schostok a.k.a. {ths} to create the book The Most Important I Do Not Tell You At All (Polish title, Najważnieszego i tak Wam nie powiem), a magazine-style publication of family photos and full-page cum-shots.  The sexually explicit are interspersed with the mundane in this autobiographical journey of Christmas trees, kittens, and hairy man-on-man action. What might feel like a scattered and inappropriate mixture actually forms a coherent image of the different identities and interactions involved in the complexities of a person’s life. Exploring moments of delicate interaction, simple portraiture, and snapshots, the images are tied together with a similar aesthetic of harsh flash photography and what feels like a plethora of shit cameras. A mix of colour and black-and-white photography, full-framed images and crops, negative scans with dust unapologetically all over the place – this work is what you’d expect to find in an old shoe-box full of someone’s memories.

Three essays are included in the work, by Krzysztof Solarewicz, Eric Tscheou, Waldemar Pranckiewicz, translated to a terrible level of English. Really, terrible. It’s possible they just ran the essays through Google Translate. Yet, somehow, even this works with the overall picture. It’s imperfect and ridiculous. Even the authors are drunk on a cocktail of styles, for example Pranckiewicz mixes attempts of academic tone with casual throwaway words like “gonna.”

A very personal work, this book feels like a soul-baring. The frequency of penises (both real and artificial) may deter some from enjoying it, but it’s not the nudity that feels revealing, it’s the book as a whole.  By exposing so many different aspects of his life, he displays the vulnerability of what it means to try to live the best way he knows how.

From Solarewicz’s essay, the below words seem apropos:

But when I think about whether I am alive, I believe I do. So when asked today if I believe, I say: “I don’t know”, and when asked if I’m alive, I reply: “I’m trying”. I know already, that I’m not gonna live my life with guarantee of eternity, I have nothing to say in my defense. All I can say the moment before another end of the world is that I tried to live like a human being; I’m still trying.

The Most Important I Do Not Tell You At All is available for sale from Miligram.

Reviewed by Katherine Oktober Matthews.