Ghosts of Abandoned Capacity

The former East Bloc has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Two decades after publishing Poland in Transition: 1989-1991, Pichaske returns to Lodz, Poland, encountering a landscape both hauntingly familiar and very much transformed, now similar, despite urban-rural differences, to his home in southwestern Minnesota, and to the places many of us inhabit in a global economy which litters the planet with empty factories, crumbling apartments, abandoned barns and schools, ghost towns and forgotten cemeteries. In a series of elegiac meditations on these "ghosts of abandoned capacity" Pichaske addresses the question of what can be done with our wrecked landscapes (and lives), everything from covering walls with graffiti and murals to renovating factories into apartments, museums, shopping malls, and schools, and just covering over the old places and cemeteries. Pichaske weaves a complex web of words and over 400 photographs, reportage and meditation, objective data and subjective critique, personal and public worlds into a book which, combining the verbal and visual, represents a new form of scholarship for the new century.