Poland in the 80's Through the Lens of French/Swiss Photographer Bruno Barbey

Well said. The rot started some years earlier. See BYTE and other contemporary computer mags going downhill or shutting down, after a great run of many years, for example. Those computer mags used to have pages and pages of code listings, and text explaining the code (even though they still had ads for products, you could either ignore them, or read them as I often did, to learn about new tech, and some of the products were even good and interesting). Same thing happened with National Geographic magazine, sadly. My dad had a lifelong subscription to NatGeo gifted to him by a mentor who he lived with in the States, a friend of his father, while doing college there. We used to get the issues in India each month (when not stolen by the postal staff, which happened sometimes). As I grew up, I noticed the mag getting thinner, less pages for articles and photos, and more for ads.

What makes photography interesting is that a photo tells you everything and nothing about a subject.

Nothing shown in any photograph is real because you're looking at an impression of reality at a single moment in time.

Amish also still exist. The issue is, this portrays a country that was by then very diverse, through a very specific perspective, that, through a rather suspicious coincidence, happens to match western stereotypes about the country, instead of challenging it.

Doesn't change the fact those are good photos, but while there might be true in their literal content, as a whole they provide a false narrative.

Many farm pictures can be seen with a 1 hour drive from Sopot today. There are some really remote places where people have horses, yet they have near gigabit LTE service. Borzestowo for example.

Coming from America where we have no single ancestor except “freedom” it’s hard to imagine why people would want to hang out there like that. However, it’s just part of the culture. We are lucky to be part of it.

It also makes people better off feel better about themselves. "You finish that plate right now, kids in Africa/India/wherever would give anything to have your food!"

Also trade trips to some other socialist countries that would happen to be better off at the moment. Depending on when exactly, it could be Czech Republic, Hungary, Yugoslavia etc.

I've rarely seen horses, and when I did they were a novelty, tractors were much more common.

It's notable how the USSR never really dumped traditional folk culture: folk tales were featured extensively in children's books, and folklore-based art was prominent. (This might've had something to do with how the government had to raise everyone's support and morale during wartime, afaik even dropping the intense opposition to religion.)

And, from what I know, mainland and especially Central European countries tend to hold tighter to their traditional culture compared to both the US and Russia (the latter having wandered around in search of its identity all through the past three centuries).

I'm not Polish, but those scenes could very well qualify as being from my country (Romania). There's more similarities between countries in Eastern Europe than we'd like to admit :)

And they did have tractors. Plowing with a horse was a curiosity even in the eighties.

yes, i know, and you're right in the sense that it is a bit more complicated than i originally said. The fall of real socialism in 198x in USSR was also associated with the part of society having that naive/romantic longing of "back to good socialism as it was originally envisioned by the great wise fuzzy warm grandpa Lenin" (never mind that Lenin was presiding over and directing the class- and political based genocide on the national scale as a natural part of his socialism) as opposed to supposedly incorrectly implemented real socialism of the time. So the Lenin explicitly embracing "Solidarity" artifacts on that photo is exactly the symbol of the same "back to and more of the good original socialism" and a rejection of that "wrong" real socialism.

The catch of course is there is only one socialism, and it is not the "good one" as that just doesn't exist...