What Gets on Your Nerves?

“What gets on your nerves?” – this is the question Kuba Dąbrowski posed to randomly met passers-by on the street. The project bore fruit in the form of a series of photographs with a short commentary to each – responses to the question, which were given with just as much sincerity, as embarrassment. To obtain credible data in sociological surveys, it is absolutely necessary to formulate the questions properly. Dąbrowski, a sociologist and photographer, has very skillfully used his sociological background to pose questions which are far from the standard public opinion poll queries. What he asks about is not actually a specific problem or phenomenon which would require one to present his/her position, but the way which people perceive reality.

There are also other results of Dąbrowski’s project – it is not just a generalized portrait or an attitude reflecting opinions and expectations of a given professional or social group. On the contrary, in the pseudo-sociological survey conducted by the photographer, the respondent’s individualism does not disappear – each passer-by remains him/herself, and preserves his/her convictions, emotions, way of experiencing the world. The comments under photographs serve as a pretext to pose new questions and seek new answers which could constitute our imagined picture of each of the persons photographed.

Though intended to build individual portraits, Dąbrowski’s project provokes questions about the society which we are co-creating. Are we frustrated? How do we encounter irritating situations? What experiences, stereotypes, ideologies, and information shape our image of the world? The micro-scale sociology entwined in Kuba Dąbrowski’s photographic project avoids typologies and simple classifications, and, at the same time, unveils the curiosity we have in everyday situations, the inclination to look at those who are next to us, focusing on their private lives rather than on some false picture of togetherness, shaped by everyday realities.

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