Exposing Wounds: Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography

26 
 
way that artists figure absence: Lewczyński’s photographs of abandoned shoes taken at 
Auschwitz in the 1950s gestures towards bodies now absent; the 1969 Kuźnia exhibition 
sees artists such as Robakowski directly exhibiting objects belonging to absent bodies, or 
making present the absent body through casting.  
 
--- 
One image in particular has stayed with me throughout the writing of this thesis. The 
photograph that has imprinted itself on my mind is a rather non-descript image made by 
Zdzisław Beksiński of a rag suspended in the air, riddled with holes [FIG.1]. In part, the 
image is about light, or rather degrees of transparency, as daylight emanates with varying 
strength through the fibres of the fabric and is released by large holes that punctuate the 
cloth. The image speaks of human agency, the worn nature of the rag gesturing to the 
ways in which it has been used. While it evokes bodies, the bodies themselves are absent, 
evacuated from the image. Instead, the image shows the traces that are left behind. No 
date is given for the image, but the grey, drab aesthetic speaks to the social conditions of 
post-war Poland and the aesthetic is reminiscent of other photographs produced by 
Beksiński in the late 1950s. In a strange way, the rag also reminds me of my own 
childhood, and in this way supports Marianne Hirsch’s theorisation of ‘postmemory’. 
Specifically, what strikes me about Beksiński’s rag is its similarity to the cleaning cloths 
that my Polish grandmother used to hang out to dry in her garden. In this way, 
Beksiński’s photograph returns me to the presence of my grandparents, who both passed 
away during the writing of this thesis. My grandparents – born in South Eastern Poland, 
now Ukraine – travelled to England via Egypt and Palestine, having both been interned 
separately in Siberia during the war. The photograph intertwines a picture of post-war 
Poland with my own personal mourning, and elides my own family history with that of 
the Polish nation.
48
 Beksiński’s melancholic photograph prompted me to think about my 
own connection with the Polish landscape and the traumas I may have inherited 
unknowingly from my grandparents’ generation. I wondered at how such a non-descript 
image could be so intensely evocative to me and serve to synthesise and condense my 
interest in the topic of this thesis. 
                                                      
48
 For their stories see Hubert Chudzio, Anna Jekczyk and Adrain Szopa, eds. Pokolenia odchodzą: Relacje 
źródłowe polskich sybiraków z Wielkiej Brytanii: Bradford, (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe 
Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2015), 79-98; 99-112. 

---

27 
 
I was thinking about this image while lecturing students on photographic theory, 
particulary texts by Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. Barthes’s 
Camera Lucida brought these ideas together, reflecting on the connection between 
photography and trauma, via an indexical understanding of the medium. In Camera 
Lucida, Barthes suggests that the photograph bears a physical connection to its referent 
through light; the photograph as a physical imprint of an object transferred by light onto 
light sensitive paper. Barthes declared that “the photograph is literally an emanation of 
the referent,” and “a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my 
gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who 
has been photographed.
49
 While this evocatively conjures “a certificate of presence,” 
Barthes acknowledged that this presence is illusory, and in fact covers an absence, a 
void.
50
 He understood the photograph as the spatial configuration of a moment which has 
since disappeared and can no longer be accessed. Iversen has eloquently summarized 
Barthes’s conclusion:  
like the rays of light from a distant star that reach us only after the star has ceased 
to exist, the photograph can only attest to the past existence of the object; the 
photographic declaration, ‘that-has-been,’ hovers between presence and absence, 
now and then.  Part of what is traumatic about photography is that it is an 
indexical trace of someone or something that is no more, or no longer the same. 
We are dealing, then, not with presence but past presence, which is to say, the 
hollowed-out presence of an absence.
51
  
At its heart then, the photograph is structured around this void. Beksiński’s Welon [Veil], 
a photograph of a cloth which partially conceals a seemingly empty landscape, seems to 
self-reflexively acknowledge the structure of the photographic medium as a porous 
membrane covering an absence. 
Jacques Lacan identified a void at the core of the psyche, a lack generated by castration 
anxiety; the veiling of this lack, Lacan suggests, structures our desire. In Seminar V, he 
uses the example of a hysteric who uses a veil to “stimulate desire.” The veil covers the 
lack, encouraging the belief that something lies beyond the veil and perpetuating the idea 
                                                      
49
 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill 
and Wang, 1981), 5. 
50
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87. 
51
 Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma, 6. 

---

28 
 
that the lost object exists, even though it always remains veiled and out of sight. To 
remove the veil would be to extinguish this desire by revealing that nothing lies behind 
it.
52
 The veil has repercussions for the Symbolic order, one element of a tripartite system 
that Lacan developed to describe different levels of psychic phenomena. His system is 
rooted in Freudian notions of infantile sexuality, specifically the mirror stage. When an 
infant first encounters a mirror, they experience a picture of themselves as whole and 
coherent. The Imaginary order becomes an internalised image of this ideal, whole self, 
geared towards coherence rather than fragmentation; the Symbolic is associated with 
rules, language and writing, and organises the way a subject functions socially according 
to agreed conventions. The Real represents everything that cannot be articulated or 
symbolised in the two previous orders – it is that which resists representation, which is 
pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic.
53
 To sustain an ideal and illusory vision of a 
coherent self in the Imaginary, the child has to expel everything that cannot be 
assimilated into this picture. Lacan identifies these banished fragments as the Real. 
Trauma, for example, would belong to the register of the Real: “The trauma is Real in so 
far as it remains unsymbolisable – a kernel of nonsense at the heart of the subject.”
54
 For 
Barthes, the defining feature of photography is also its relationship to this register. In the 
opening pages of Camera Lucida, Barthes makes direct reference to Lacan’s Seminar XI, 
suggesting that a photograph is defined not by its attachment to the Imaginary and 
Symbolic orders, but to another register, a third which lies outside of both these orders, 
                                                      
52
 Jacques Lacan, Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958), May 7, 1958, 11. This lack or 
void that structures our desire is, for Lacan, generated by an anxiety around castration, which involves the 
recognition of an absence. The lack of phallus in the mother generates anxiety in the child about their own 
body, and becomes metonymically linked to the recognition of lack. This opens up a gap in the desire of the 
child. The acknowledgement of a ‘lack’ in the Other creates a hole in the Symbolic Order, which leads to a 
constant search for that lost object. In 1964, Lacan developed the idea of objet petit a, part objects which we 
use to fill this void – objects which embody this fundamental lack and which displace the desire for the lost 
object onto something else: “The 
objet a
 is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, 
has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as 
such, but insofar as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, first, separable and, secondly, that 
has some relation to the lack.” (Lacan, 
Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of 
Psychoanalysis
, 4 March 1964, 104.)  The purpose of the object petit a is also partly to veil from the 
subject the terminal nature of its loss.   
53
 Jacques Lacan, “Symbol and Language,” in The Language of the Self (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1956); Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Ecrits, (New York: W.W. 
Norton & Co., 1958); Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in 
psychoanalytic experience,” Ecrits (London: Tavistock, 1977).  
54
 Margaret Iversen, “What is a Photograph?” Art History 17 no. 3 (September 1994), 454-5. 

---