The kiss
The Kiss is a photo was taken in 1990, just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when I was travelling through Poland with an old 35mm film camera.
The Kiss, Poland 1990
The Canon F1 I was using had a removable top shoe with a plate‑glass viewfinder, so I could look down into it and photograph street scenes discreetly, without people realising they were being observed.
This was long before mobile phone cameras and digital imagery, and a roll of film held only thirty‑six frames.
I wasn’t seeking perfection – I was happy with blur and grain and the rawness of photos and I wasn’t concerned with technical details or composition. They were a visceral response to what was happening as I felt and saw it.
At that time, Poland was in rapid transition. The Communist system had collapsed only months before, and the new system hadn’t yet taken shape. People were discovering new ways to make a living.
Daily life seemed industrial and grey, and people were downtrodden. There was a sense of uncertainty everywhere – in the buildings, in the conversations, and in the way people carried themselves through the streets.
One morning, I saw a man and a woman approaching each other on the pavement. They stopped for a moment, kissed and embraced each other warmly, and then continued on their separate ways. It was an ordinary moment, over in seconds, but because of the wider atmosphere – the greyness, the unease, the feeling that people were still adjusting to a changed world – it stood out.
The Many Truths of Josef Batten, 2025
As I passed them, I took one photograph, looking down through the viewfinder so they wouldn’t notice. That single frame stayed with me. Years later, it became the cover image for The Many Truths of Josef Batten.
When I began writing the novel, this moment became the basis for a scene where nine year old Josef witnesses something that alters the way he understands the world beyond the limits of his home.
The following passage from the book is set in Katowice Poland in March 1939 and reads:
“On that morning, a man got on the tram carrying a bunch of red flowers. In a city turning grey with fear, those petals burned against the gloom like tiny embers of defiance. Josef stared at them, transfixed, framing them into an exotic image as they swayed with the movement of the tram.
Then he saw something else that held him still. Outside he watched a man and a woman on the pavement walking toward each other. He in a heavy coat, she with a bag swinging at her side. They met, smiled and kissed, their bodies folding into one another, an extraordinary moment of warmth in a world growing colder by the day.
Josef was mesmerised. He had never witnessed tenderness so freely given. It was a revelation, something apart from the harshness of his home, the brutality of his father and the cold silence of his grandmother. At that moment he forgot everything, the tram stops, his school, the lessons he was meant to endure. The world outside the window became his whole existence; he let the tram carry him past his stop, past his school and everything he knew.”
For me, this photograph is a reminder of how these little moments can fix themselves in memory and later find their way into a story. It wasn’t taken with that intention, but it became part of the foundation for one of Josef’s earliest turning points in the novel.