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

CHAPTER I 
 
MODERN POLISH PHOTOGRAPHY 
 
Photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the war had the potential to work 
through cathartically the recent events that had indelibly imprinted themselves on the 
collective and individual psyche. Many photographers working after 1945 had 
experienced the war directly, or “bodily,” to quote Czesław Miłosz.
1
 However, what 
interests me is not a direct engagement with imagery that makes visible the horrors of the 
war, for example, the documentary photographs taken at the liberation of the 
concentration camps, but rather photographs which approach this subject indirectly, and 
which perhaps even unknowingly bear the traces of this trauma. In this first chapter, I 
compare the photographs of Jan Bułhak and Zbigniew Dłubak. Bułhak had lived through 
not one, but two wars, and in 1945 found himself homeless due to loss of territories in the 
east of Poland. He subsequently resettled in Warsaw. Dłubak had been arrested following 
the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau before being 
transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp. The war was not the only event to cast a 
shadow on the photographs being produced in these post-war years. After 1945 
photographers also found themselves in the first years of a newly reconstituted nation 
with a vastly changed population, Soviet colonisation of the country and political 
infighting between factions of the Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej [Polish 
Provisional Government of National Unity]. Alongside mourning for the recent past, 
artists also participated in the “euphoria of reconstruction,” an impulse to rebuild the 
Polish cities after wartime destruction.
2
 As Polish citizens came out to clear the tons of 
rubble that filled the country’s streets, they saw Poland was a nation that was going to be 
rebuilt, and photographers contributed to disseminating this message.  
I begin by introducing Jan Bułhak and his aesthetic renderings of the Polish landscape, 
before turning to the abstract imagery created by Zbigniew Dłubak in the same years. 
This turn to abstraction can be understood as one possible response to the question of 
                                                      
1
 Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 93. 
2
 Just after the War, Zach ta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, October 3, 2015 – January 10, 2016. 

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32 
 
making art after the war. Abstraction was something that the Polish writer Czesław 
Miłosz suggested was “preferred” in the immediate aftermath of war, in the face of a 
lived reality that was “the source of deep traumas.”
3
 Rather than representing a reality 
that was beyond representation, artists might turn inwards to their own subjective 
responses. However, I will argue that abstraction does not solely consist of an abdication 
of responsibility in favour of a turn inwards. In scrutinising a series of works made by 
Dłubak in 1948, I will suggest a more nuanced reading of his abstraction through the 
psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. I will also suggest that 
the work did not just look to the past, but was very much rooted in the present political 
atmosphere. This theme continues in another series begun by Dłubak in 1950, 
Krajobrazach [Landscapes], which documents marginal areas in the suburbs of Warsaw. 
At a moment when the heroic reconstruction of Polish cities was being proclaimed by 
official media, Dłubak’s photographs offer an alternative reflection on the Polish 
landscape. 
The comparison of work by Bułhak and Dłubak reveals a battle between the old guard of 
Polish photography and a younger generation of photographers intent on pursuing an 
altogether different direction that responded to developments in other artistic mediums. 
Two exhibitions will be examined to make evident the divergent styles of the Bułhak 
school of photography and Dłubak’s alternative vision: the 1947 I OgólnopolskaWystawa 
Fotografiki [First National Exhibition of Art Photography], which continued the pre-war 
tradition of photographic pictoralism, and an exhibition organised by Dłubak in Warsaw 
in 1948 titled Nowoczesna Fotografika Polska [Modern Polish Photography], in which 
photographers decisively turned away from both realism and Pictorialism in favour of 
abstraction. Dłubak’s exhibition was staged at a critical moment when artists attempted to 
defend their work from increasing interference from the Ministry of Culture and Arts, the 
source of another potential trauma. 
One of the first post-war manifestations of photography in Poland was a one man show 
given to Jan Bułhak at the Muzeum Narodowe [National Museum] in Warsaw in 1946, 
titled Ruiny Warszawy [The Ruins of Warsaw] [I.1]. Poland’s capital city had suffered a 
particularly violent assault during the war, with Adolf Hitler having personally instructed 
                                                      
3 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 93. 

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33 
 
that the city be “razed to the ground.”
4
 The vast majority of Warsaw’s buildings had been 
destroyed, reducing the city to “a vast sea of rubble.”
5
 In the immediate post-war years, 
visual imagery of ruins “appeared with compulsive, even melancholic, regularity,” as 
noted by David Crowley in his study of the visual and cultural history of the city of 
Warsaw.
6
 The iconography and symbolism of ruins has been much discussed, notably by 
David Lowenthal, Brian Dillon and Andreas Sch nle, and I only intend to pause here to 
note the frequency with which Polish photographers were documenting their destroyed 
cities, which suggests a behavioural pattern comparable to the symptoms of repetition 
compulsion.
7
  Jan Bułhak took almost a thousand photographs of the city of Warsaw, 
some of which were displayed at the Muzeum Narodowe exhibition. From 1945 Leonard 
Sempoliński also systematically photographed Warsaw’s Old Town street by street, 
documenting ruined monuments, destroyed facades and close-ups of architectural details 
[I.2]. Sempoliński intended these subdued, melancholic images to immortalise the 
destroyed city that was to be cleared and rebuilt. He retrospectively wrote: “I was walking 
through the places of torment and ruins of the town in a state of strange excitement. I felt 
and read the tragedy of Warsaw out of each piece of paving-stone and block of ruin. I 
knew that this was the end of a chapter in life, and at the same time the beginning of 
something new.”
8
 
Bodily terms abounded in the descriptions of ruins in these years, with ruins invoked as 
the ‘wounds’ of the city, a metaphor for bodily mutilation. This affective corporeal 
invocation of the ruin served an allegorical purpose, metonymically standing in for bodies 
no longer present. Yet Sempoliński’s quote suggests that his photographs did not simply 
testify to tragedy, or serve as indexes to the destruction; they also incorporated the 
promise of future reconstruction. This message was harnessed by a Soviet-backed 
socialist government. Andreas Schönle, studying the link between ruins and historical 
consciousness, has noted how Soviet authorities “were keen to exploit ruins as a 
                                                      
4
 Cited by Stanisław Jankowski, “Warsaw: Destruction, Secret Town Planning, 1939-44, and Postwar 
Reconstruction” in Rebuilding Europe’s Bombed Cities, ed., Jeffrey M. Diefendorf (London, 1990), 79. 
5
 David Crowley, “‘Memory in Pieces’: The Symbolism of the Ruin in Warsaw after 1944,” Journal of 
Modern European History 9 no. 3 (2011): 352. 
6
 David Crowley, Warsaw (London: Reaktion, 2003), 27. 
7
 See David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); 
Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, Irresistible decay: ruins reclaimed, exhibition 
catalogue (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997); 
Julia Hell and Andreas Sch nle, eds. Ruins of modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Brian 
Dillon, Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011). 
8
 Leonard Sempoliński, “Dlaczego fotografowałem Warszawę” [
Why did I Photograph Warsaw
] in 
Warszawa 1945
, ed. Emilia Borecka (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukow, 1975), 293. 

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