One of Chris Niedenthal’s images of Poland in the 1980s — he called it “Everything’s Gray.” I wish I’d taken more photos of the parts of Poland I knew that looked like this because they’re gone. That’s probably a good thing, but I wish I’d photographed those places myself.

There was a bar in my village that I almost never entered. It was the GS-owski bar and even in the mid-90s, it looked like one would always imagine a bar to look in a communist country.